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July 12, 2006, 03:14 PM ET
Librarians Fight for Facebook
Federal lawmakers are, for the moment, preternaturally worried about the specter of “online predators”—and their preoccupation is keeping Chris Kelly pretty busy. Twice in the last two weeks, Mr. Kelly, chief privacy officer for Facebook, the popular social-networking Web site, has headed to Capitol Hill to describe what Facebook is doing to keep its users safe.
At the end of June he spoke at a House hearing titled “Making the Internet Safe for Kids” (The Chronicle, June 30). And yesterday he appeared before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet to discuss a bill that would prohibit anyone younger than 18 from using social-networking sites on computers at public schools and libraries. The “Deleting Online Predators Act,” as it is called, would also prohibit minors from using public machines to log on to chat rooms and some online forums (The Chronicle, May 12).
Mr. Kelly depicted Facebook’s security as robust before suggesting, rather gently, that the bill is a bit too broad. But Beth Yoke, executive director of the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association, didn’t mince words. The bill, she argued, “creates barriers to information literacy” by discouraging librarians and schoolteachers from teaching young students about responsible use of the Web. “This flies in the face of logic and hundreds of years of educational theory,” Ms. Yoke said of the act. —Brock Read
Categories: Security, Student-Life
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