Facebook is relaxing its rules for teenagers. The 13- to
17-year-old set now has the option to share photos, updates and comments with
the general public on Facebook. That means strangers, and companies collecting
data for advertisers and marketing companies, will be able to see select posts.
Teenagers will also be able to turn on the Follow feature for their profiles,
which would allow anyone they're not friends with to see their public posts in
the main news feed.
The social network is trying to balance the less strict
settings with two other privacy protections. When new underage users sign up
for a Facebook account, their posts will be shown to a more limited audience by
default -- only to friends instead of friends of friends. If a teen decides to
change the setting to Public, she or he will see a pair of pop-up warnings
explaining what "public" means. One warns they could end up
"getting friend requests and messages from people they don't know
personally." Default settings for existing teens with profiles won't change
or affect past posts.
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Facebook has been around for more than nine years and
stopped being a hip place for kids long ago when it was invaded by parents, grandparents
and advertisers. It has 1.2 billion users. Even as it expands to all ages, the
company has to work to hang on to the coveted teen demographic.
In a recent Pew study, teens reported "waning
enthusiasm" for the social network, citing the presence of adults and
drama. The site has become too important to typical teen life to abandon, so
94% of teens on social media have a Facebook account, and the average teen user
has 300 friends.
Other social networks such as Twitter, Tumblr and Last.fm
don't prevent teens from posting publicly. However, if someone under 18 wanted
to bypass the setting on Facebook before today, they could easily lie about
their age when signing up for an account. Children under 13 are not officially
allowed to sign up for a Facebook account, though they can skirt the rules in
the same way. When someone underage does sign up for an account, Facebook
assumes they have the permission of at least one guardian but does not verify
it in any way.
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