Sex offenders lurk on Facebook, Conn. official says

Reuters - Facebook came under fire on yesterday from a state attorney general who accused the fast-growing social networking site of falling short in protecting young users from sexual predators on its site.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in an interview that his office had learned of "at least three" convicted sex offenders on Facebook's site and that may be the "tip of the iceberg."

"These individuals are using their real names after convictions for felony sexual offenses," Blumenthal said. "There may be thousands or hundreds of thousands using aliases or false identities who have never been convicted."

The state official said Facebook appears to suffer some of the dangers from predators and pornography that larger and more freewheeling social network site MySpace does. Last week, MySpace said it had deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders from its own service, which attracts 60 million U.S. visitors (see "MySpace finds 29,000 sex offenders among its users, says N.C. official").

Started in 2004 by then-undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg as a socializing site for fellow Harvard University students, Facebook opened up more than a year ago to allow users of all ages to create personal profiles to share with friends.

Facebook, with privacy features encouraging members to share personal details like phone numbers, political loyalties or dating status for an approved circle of friends, has grown by more than a third to 33 million members in the past two months.

Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly said Facebook has privacy features unlike other social network sites that segment users by age, organization and region, and make it hard for adults to contact users under the age of 18.

In particular, Facebook protects users under 18 by preventing adults from contacting them if the adults are not affiliated with a specific school network, Kelly said.

Kelly acknowledged Facebook has detected sexual predators and other abusive practices on the site but said the numbers were small. 

"There is a non-zero number. We have been able to handle abuses with the accountability of having a real-name culture versus a 'screen-name' culture," he said.

Kelly said Facebook had been notified Monday afternoon by the Connecticut attorney general's office of three specific profiles set up by known sex offenders and that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company had quickly removed these Web pages.

"There is no city in existence, let alone one that has 33 million citizens, that doesn't have occasional crime," Kelly said. "The question is, does the site make it easier or harder to commit crimes and what does it do to address them?"

Technical versus legal protections

Blumenthal and attorneys general from other states have been pushing for state and federal laws to require social network sites to seek age and identity verification from users as well as parental consent for minors to join such sites.