Increasingly popular site Facebook is not only in competition with MySpace or Orkut, but also with New York's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, whose investigators have tested the site's safety policy while Microsoft was apparently busy with making a $300 million offer to Mark Zuckerberg.
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo decided to continue investigations at Facebook after preliminary results indicate that the site's safety policy has some serious flaws, despite the fact that advertisements indicate the contrary. Moreover, Cuomo's office accused Facebook's slow responsiveness to the requests made by undercover agents posing as parents and even suggested that Andrew Zuckerberg's social networking site neglects those requests.
During the month of August, Cuomo's investigators had established profiles on Facebook posing at first as under aged members. They found that in numerous occasions solicitations from adult sexual predators abounded and that a wide range of pornographic materials could have easily been accessed from an under aged Facebook member. The Attorney General's office also incriminated the site's lack of reaction in front of legitimate demands coming from agents posing as parents, calling this attitude "even more disturbing".
“My office is concerned that Facebook's promise of a safe website is not consistent with its performance in policing its site and responding to complaints,” Cuomo said. “Parents have a right to know what their children will encounter on a website that is aggressively marketed as safe.”
The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) offered some details about the ongoing investigation, stating that the "fake" under aged profiles included users between twelve and fourteen years old, whose registration did not require verification of a high school email address or any other identifying information in order to register the account.
When undercover OAG investigators lodged complaints with Facebook regarding the inappropriate - and illegal - solicitation of the underage users, Facebook in many instances ignored the complaints and took no action against the reported sexual predators. The OAG made these complaints to Facebook posing both as underage users as well as parents of underage users.
OAG investigators also lodged several complaints with Facebook about inappropriate content or communications on the website. In response, Facebook took down many inappropriate images within a week of receiving our complaints. On the other hand, other complaints reporting user groups that hosted hardcore pornography were ignored by Facebook, and the content remains available to all users - including underage users - to this day.
OAG considered "alarming" Facebook's attitude to ignored several - and repeated - complaints from our undercover investigators concerning persons who made inappropriate sexual advances to under age users.
Facebook responded yesterday saying that “We take the concerns of the office of the New York attorney general very seriously.”
“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 strive to uphold our high standards for privacy on Facebook and are constantly working on processes and technologies that will further improve safety and user control on the site” the press statement added.
The legal scandals, which is seem to be a constant that plagues most social networking sites, including MySpace, come in a time when speculation about a possible offer from Microsoft for 5% from the 10th most visited site in the world are getting some consistency.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft could pay between $300 and $500 for that 5 percent, considering that the current investors estimate Facebook at more than $10 billion.
In the past Yahoo!, Viacom and others have tried to purchase Facebook. Terry Semel, the then CEO of Yahoo tried to buy Facebook for $1 billion, Zuckerberg rejected it.
Microsoft's greatest rival in this deal is of course the ever expanding Google, who has a stronger background and better perspectives, considering its lucky investment in YouTube or Orkut.
