Facebook rejects CEOP ‘Panic Button’
Since the tragic death of Ashleigh Hall, a British teenager murdered by a man she befriended through Facebook, the social networking site has faced calls to up its security measures. One of which is the inclusion of a ‘panic button’ on the Facebook homepage. Facebook has now ruled this particular measure out.
Ashleigh Hall was an ordinary 17-year-old girl. And like any other ordinary 17-year-old girl, she had a Facebook account. It was through this that she met the man who would go on to murder her. That man is Peter Chapman, 33, who posed on Facebook as a teenage boy called Peter Cartwright. After befriending Hall, and arranging to meet in person, he raped and then suffocated Hall before dumping her body in a field. Chapman was caught and has been sentenced to serve at least 35 years in jail.
However, such a high-profile case has prompted the British government – along with child protection agencies – to demand Facebook take measures to prevent similar cases occurring. The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, today met Facebook executives to discuss what changes the site could make to help stop this kind of abuse.
There are calls for Facebook to install a ‘panic button’ on the homepage and every profile. This would provide an instant link to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) center in order for children to report abuse of the system. According to BBC News, Facebook has ruled out installing the button on its main page but will include links to CEOP and similar organizations on its Safety Center pages.
Officials from CEOP and Facebook are scheduled to meet again in Washington on April 12.
Facebook should seriously think about making security a much more high profile part of the site, rather than tucking it away in its own section where the majority of users will never visit. While it’s unlikely the ‘panic button’ would have made any difference to Ashleigh Hall, it may help countless other youngsters subjected to unwelcome attention on the social networking site. Which is surely a good thing.
However, the fact is that parents need to educate their children as to how to protect themselves online. Because it can, in some cases, be just as dangerous as offline.
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March 19th, 2010
Do these people even know how facebook works? if you want to get rid of an undesirable connection you can simply “un-friend” them. As long as your privacy settings are set correctly, there is little else the undesirable person can do. A panic button is going to do little else and would have had no effect on the murder case. she obviously had no suspicions that would have led her to make use of such a button, otherwise she wouldn’t have been to meet him.