49 Attorney generals in the United States have signed on with Facebook to protect children from being bullied or contacted by potentially dangerous people through their profile pages. Given how easy it is to contact and learn information about people through Facebook (and any other social networking site) the safety features do seem like a necessary and important step.

Forbes.com reports that the features to be implemented include moves to:

• Remove groups whose comments or images suggest they may involve incest, pedophilia, bullying or other inappropriate content.
• Participate in the Harvard-based task force set up in January under the national agreement with MySpace. It includes scholars, a prosecutor, businesses, state officials and child safety advocates.
• Send warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an adult.
• Review users' profiles when they ask to change their age, ensuring the update is legitimate and not intended to let adults masquerade as children.

Facebook has also agreed to enforce the safety requirements on all Facebook applications (in an attempt to stop children from giving out their information to unknown adults) and delete the profiles of registered sex offenders.

The steps have been suggested in response to a number of incidents involving Facebook that have had negative consequences. In 2006 hurtful comments from a fake Facebook profile (set up by an adult) led a 13 year old girl to hang herself. This is obviously an extreme example, but gives an indication that Facebook profiles can be a tool to cause harm.

It remains unclear how Facebook can verify the identities given by people who register, but some kind of monitoring does seem to be the only option. Individual privacy is going to come up against child protection in a number of respects here, but it’s tough to argue that no kind of monitoring should be carried out.