Professional Issue Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Professional Issue - Essay Example About 50 per cent of the total population of children in Britain between 9 and 12 years of age use the social networking sites in spite of the established limits of minimum age. According to EUKidsOnline, at least one in every five children has a profile on Facebook despite the fact that the rules require children to be 13 years old to have a Facebook profile (BBC, 2011). The matter of safety of the innocent users of social networking sites like children is debatable. This paper draws a critical analysis of the argument that social networking sites pose threats to the safety of children. An Overview of the Laws in UK related to Social Networking Sites Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998 Organizations in the UK that deal with the information about living as well as the identifiable people are obliged to show compliance with the DPA 1998 provisions. Service providers have to be very careful while processing children’s information to comply with the DPA 1998 provisions. This includes the providers of social networking sites that gather the users’ personal data to enable the registration. ... However, the new requirements of notification also include the email addresses’ registration. The government has proposed that these blacklisted email addresses be forwarded to the social networking sites so that they can check the email addresses against the ones in their user base and accordingly, deactivate the matching accounts. Guidance Report by the Home Office Task Force on Child Protection The Home Office Task Force on Child Protection published a note of guidance on the Internet in April, 2008 whose objective was to enhance the safety of children using the social networking sites. Along with serving as a resource of education for the parents, the guidance provides the providers of the social networking services with recommendations on ways to operate the sites in such a way that safety of the users is maximized. The guidance report of the Home Office acknowledges the fact that no environment is completely safe for children in any circumstances, though risks can be red uced by changing the default settings of privacy for the users under 18 years of age to private, making the private profiles of the users below 18 years of age non-searchable without the users’ consent, clear declaration of the information that would be publicly available that what would be private at the time of registration, declaration of simple and user-friendly ways of reporting abuse, discouragement for children to provide excessive information about themselves, and establishment of a system of sharing of reports of abuse between the law enforcement agencies and the industry (The In-House Lawyer, 2008, p. 82). In addition to that, the government of the UK â€Å"set guidelines requiring the sharing of the ‘email addresses’ of registered sex offenders to