Facebook kicks off 20,000 underage users a day

 According to Facebook’s chief privacy adviser, Mozelle Thompson, the social networking site is kicking off around 20,000 underage users per day, as told to Australia’s parliament earlier this week.

Apparently, kids are managing to slip through Facebook’s just-ask-age screening approach, as these kids under 13 can simply enter a false age.

Thompson admitted this, saying that “the site’s way of singling out those who don’t meet the 13-and-up age requirement is not perfect.” Thompson added that

 “There are people who lie. There are people who are under 13.”

 A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that “nearly half of all U.S. 12-year-olds use social networking sites — and privacy concerns in regard to Facebook’s younger members have been growing of late.”

This issue pushed Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, to write to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the possible reforms in the site’s privacy and security measures.

“Under Facebook’s policy, 13 million users under the age of 18 may be allowed to share their personal information just like adult users,” Franken wrote. “These younger users are the most vulnerable to predators on Facebook and the rest of the Internet and it should be impossible for them to inadvertently share their phone numbers and home addresses with anyone.”

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