British police tell Facebook: your efforts to combat paedophiles are not enough

Facebook has come under attack from Britain’s most senior police officers, who have criticised the social-networking giant for refusing to adopt a “panic button” which would allow victims of online sexual grooming to report their concerns directly to the authorities.

Facebook has come under attack from Britain’s most senior police officers, who have criticised the social-networking giant for refusing to adopt a “panic button” which would allow victims of online sexual grooming to report their concerns directly to the authorities.The social-networking site yesterday announced that it would adopt the “button”, designed by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), on one page of its site – a page which appears when users have already decided to report abuse. But it is still refusing to adopt the button on every page of its site, as requested by Britian’s online protection agency, because it claims that to do so could create “additional complexity” and may result in fewer people reporting grooming.
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-tell-facebook-your-efforts-to-combat-paedophiles-are-not-enough-1944056.htmlAlso see:Should Facebook Have a ‘Panic Button’?
Last October, Ashleigh Hall, a 17-year-old British student, told her mother she was staying at a friend’s house and instead arranged to meet a teenage boy she had been messaging with on Facebook. She never returned the next morning. The teenage boy turned out to be a 32-year-old serial sex offender, Peter Chapman, who raped and murdered Hall and dumped her body in a ditch. Chapman eventually confessed to the crimes and was jailed for life last month.In the wake of Hall’s murder, the teenager’s family was joined by British child protection advocates in demanding that Facebook install a so-called “panic button” on its pages — a box that people could click to immediately access information about Internet safety topics such as cyber-stalking and sexual abuse.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1981975,00.html

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