DANGER LURKS IN SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES?!?!

SNS provides an infrastructure where individuals are allowed to interact with others. However, no one can deny that these sites have also allowed illegal or wrongful form of interaction to take place. Privacy and safety concerns are some issues that allows certain SNSs to boom in popularity if the SNS handles them well.

On the 24th of September 2007, the State of New York's Office of Attorney General (OAG) issued an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, to inform him of potential glitches that may threaten the security and privacy concerns of its social networking service, one of such concerns is its slow response time to complaints made by the users.

Described in this open letter, the OAG had several of its investigators disguising as minors who created accounts with Facebook. The purpose of the investigation was to point out the fact that there were (and possibly, are) sexual predators around, and that Facebook seemed to be facilitating the service, in favour of them, as the site was slow in reacting (or not even reacting) to the dummy complaints made by the investigators. Although Facebook claims on its "Safety" page that inappropriate and illegal contents will be quickly removed from the site to assure parents of the users that the site is safe for their children to use and Facebook also encourages users to report various unwanted materials (postings, messages, photos and more) and that Facebook will "act accordingly" in response, the investigation proved otherwise.

"We take the concerns of the Office of the New York Attorney General very seriously," Facebook representative Brandee Barker told the press in a statement. "As our service continues to grow, so does our responsibility to our users to empower them with the tools necessary to communicate efficiently and safely...We are committed to working closely with all the state attorneys general to maintain a trusted environment for all Facebook users and to demonstrate the efficacy of these efforts."

(Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9788413-36.html)

How safe can it be on the Internet, social networking sites in particular?

Nobody can exactly answer this question precisely, but all should note that the stakeholders involved are constantly improving their facilities to ensure that at any one time, their security measures are first-class.