Error in Facebook Messaging Application Exposes Children to Strangers |
Posted: August 22, 2019 |
An error in the Facebook application designed for children under 13, which allows them to chat online with people with whom their parents disagree. The messaging application is designed to give parents control over who their children are in online text and video chat, New Digital Technologies but an error in the program allows an authorized contact to chat with a child to talk to another child without the Parental consent of the second child. "Recently, some parents of users of the Messenger Kids account reported a technical error that we found affecting a small number of group conversations," Facebook said in a statement to TechNewsWorld by Richards spokesman Thomas Richards. "We stopped the affected chats and provided parents with additional resources on Messenger Kids and online security." In the letter to parents, Facebook included links to the application's frequently asked questions, the Parental Control Center for the program and the comments page. The breakdown of parental control occurs when a child is part of a group chat. Any person who chat with a person individually must be approved by their parents. However, in group chat, the group organizer can invite the members surveyed to communicate with the organizer, but cannot speak with other group members. The application error allows all group members to chat with each other, whether they are approved by a parent. False sense of security Laurie Faith Cranor, director of the Safety and Protection Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the failure in Messenger Kids is a symptom of a problem that is not just Facebook. "It's an access control problem. Access control can be very difficult," he told TechNewsWorld. "Many companies have made a mistake in many ways," Cranor said. "This is just another example of how they are not interested in access control." We see it all the time in the corporate world where the wrong people have access to something they should not have access to because access control is difficult correctly". When Messenger Kids was launched, Facebook issued this announcement: "Messenger Kids gives parents more control. Parents have full control over the contact list and children can't call contacts that parents don't approve." Serious consequences Thousands of children stayed in chat groups with users unknown to their parents, according to media reports. Karen North, director of the Annenberg Online Community Program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has noticed that even a child exposed to a stranger in a chat room could become a nightmare for Facebook. "Doing things that violate children's privacy and allow adults to reach children is always great," he told TechNewsWorld. "It only takes one predator to have serious consequences." This latest Facebook error is part of what appears to be an endless stream of bad news about the company. "It's one thing after another. They were subject to security breaches in the days when they announced new security policies," North said. "If you want to issue cryptocurrencies, you have to clean your work to be able to trust it daily." Facebook announced last month that it plans to launch its own crypto currency, Libra, next year. FTC filed a complaint Problems to collect data on Messenger Kids arose a few months after the launch of the application in 2018. The Boston-based Student Privacy Parent Coalition filed a complaint with the United States Federal Trade Commission alleging that Messenger Kids violated the Federal Child Protection Law online. The Facebook application collected personal information from children up to five years of age without verifiable parental consent, Latest Trends in Tech and did not provide parents with clear and complete disclosures of Facebook's data practices, which the group maintained in its complaint. The parental consent mechanism on Facebook does not comply with the requirements of COPPA because it is not reasonably calculated to ensure that the person granting the consent is actually the father of the child, as indicated by the complaint. The group said in a statement that any adult user can approve any Messenger Kids account, and the test confirmed that even a fictional parent with a new Facebook account could immediately approve the child's account without proof of identity. Impact on the poor North added that problems with Messenger Kids are likely to have a disproportionate impact on children from low-income families. No one knows why low-income communities are attracted to Facebook, but one possible explanation is that it is easy to use on shared devices, as the North put it. "If you are poor and you are using a school or library computer, Snapchat and Instagram will not work well," he said. "What you have to do is Facebook Messenger or Facebook Messenger."
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|