Facebook wants your kids

PEOPLE DATABASE and privacy shredding social notworking web site Facebook might open its doors to pre-teens, according to Mark Zuckerberg.

The billionaire internet upstart is promoting the idea of letting under 13-year old children join his data profiling social web site, once he works out how to counter the requirements of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

Young Zuckerberg, who is not all that much older than 13 himself, is willing to fight the kiddy corner, if he can figure out how to get away with it.

"My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age. Because of the restrictions we haven't even begun this learning process," he said. "If they're lifted then we'd start to learn what works." Now "lifted", there's a revealing term.

Zuckerberg was talking at a summit meeting last week in California, where all the great ideas come from, don'tcha know, and specifically he was at a summit on educational innovation.

Why someone that invented a vapid online hot spot for people to giggle in, poke each other and be marketed to was invited to attend is anyone's guess. But this is, after all, the US state that elected not only Ronnie Reagan but also Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governator, two film actors, to its highest elected office.

Early reports got out of hand according to the entreprenuer and fortunately, for him, Zuckerberg got the chance to qualify his comments at the EG8 conference that's currently being held in France.

Asked the question again by Maurice Lévy, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, he said that current regulations did indeed make it difficult for under 13-year olds to sign up to social networking accounts, but added that it was nothing that Facebook was actively working on.

"Getting a parent [to approve a child's account] adds a lot of friction to the sign up process," he said, adding that was the main reason why so far Facebook was not open to young children.

He said that although it 'made sense' to explore the idea, Facebook would "have to figure out a lot of ways to keep them safe," and explained that this is not a priority for his social network. µ