NEW YORK--Facebook appears to be making peace with New York's aggressive attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo.
At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon at Cuomo's office in downtown Manhattan, the attorney general along with Facebook vice president and chief privacy officer Chris Kelly unveiled a joint plan to address concerns about sexual predators on the fast-growing social-networking site.
"This did start out as an investigation," Kelly explained to the room full of reporters and photographers, "but it has turned into a great cooperative effort that we hope the whole industry will follow."
Cuomo had subpoenaed Facebook last month, claiming that an undercover investigation into the social network had revealed that it misrepresents how safe its service is for minors. His office had issued an open letter to the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company, explaining that investigators posing as underage users of the site (12 to 14 years old) were "repeatedly solicited by adult sexual predators" and that Facebook's response to complaints about harassment was slow at best.
In Tuesday's press conference, Kelly acknowledged that Facebook had "slipped a little bit" in its attentiveness to safety concerns. Cuomo called the end result a "successful conclusion."
With the new plan, Facebook will place user complaints about "nudity, pornography, harassment, (and) unwelcome contact" into a high-priority category that will require a response from the site within 24 hours. "We're committing to a 24-hour service level on addressing those complaints," Kelly asserted. These complaints can be filed anonymously through new links throughout Facebook's site.
Some language on the site will also be altered to make it clear to concerned parents that neither Facebook nor any other site on the Internet is wholly safe for children.
Additionally, Cuomo's office will approve a third-party Independent Safety and Security Examiner (ISSE) to monitor and report on the site for the next two years. A "prominent and easily accessible hyperlink" will allow Facebook users or their parents to provide feedback to the watchdog group.
When asked how the ISSE, who has not yet been appointed, would be compensated, Cuomo responded with two words: "Facebook pays."
Facebook, according to Kelly, now has over 47 million users, 80 percent of which are over the age of 18. Nevertheless, any Web site that's in the spotlight the way Facebook has been for the past few months will experience a degree of legal scrutiny from authorities concerned about children's safety--social networking's last poster child, the News Corp.-owned MySpace, was the target of extensive inquiries on the part of several states' attorneys general with regard to the presence of registered sex offenders on the site.
"We are in discussion with other sites," Cuomo said when asked if his office was targeting any other social networks the way it did with Facebook, but he would not provide any specifics.
Anne Milgram, the attorney general for the state of New Jersey, issued a subpoena on Monday against popular social-networking site Facebook, requesting that the company turn over information as to whether registered sex offenders have profiles on the site. The return date for the subpoena is October 12.
Milgram's office has additionally sent letters to 11 other social networking sites, asking that they release similar data. It's unclear as to which social-networking sites those are; representatives for the attorney general's office were not immediately available for comment.
"This is a matter of public safety, and more specifically, a matter of children's safety," Milgram said in a statement on Tuesday. "Social networking sites should not be virtual playing fields for sexual predators." The statement went on to say that a list of registered sex offenders in the state of New Jersey was sent to Facebook last month, and that the company said it had identified and removed an unspecified number of matching profiles. But according to Milgram's office, that isn't enough; the attorney general has demanded specifics, particularly names and e-mail addresses.
When a social-networking site has been riding as high as Facebook has for the past few months, it's only a matter of time before the safety concerns--and ensuing legal action--start to roll in. Earlier this year, subpoenas were issued by multiple state attorneys general against MySpace, then in social media's spotlight, and Milgram's office ultimately said the process led to the identification and deletion of 268 registered sex offenders' profiles in New Jersey alone.
Now that Facebook has largely replaced MySpace as the company capturing news headlines and valuation rumors, it's no surprise that it would have its turn in safety advocates' crosshairs as well. Late in September, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued against a subpoena against the social-networking site, but the terms were slightly different. Cuomo's office was more concerned about the site's overall claim that it provides a secure environment, even threatening that Facebook may face a consumer fraud charge for misrepresenting how safe the site is for minors.
In response to that, Facebook representatives said that the company is "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." Facebook has not yet responded to requests for comment with regard to the more recent subpoena from the New Jersey attorney general.
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