Facebook Privacy and Safety for Children

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Children under 13 are not permitted to have accounts on Facebook. For those children 13 and over, they must be protected from harassment, cyberbullying, scammers and predators.

Tips for Parents to Protect Children on Facebook:

  1. Join Facebook yourself and insist that your children "friend" you. Monitor their activity from your account.
    • Look out for status updates that share too much. The Internet Crime Complaint Center warned that "Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes" reveals too much about a parent's absence, especially when periodically posted at the same times.
     
  2. Use your own e-mail address as the contact for your children's account. This will allow you to receive their notifications. You can subscribe broadly to notifications, such as invites, friend requests, and photo tags in Account Settings.
     
  3. Instruct your children to accept friend requests from only people they know.
     
  4. Report incidents of self-harm, violence and threats, bullying and harassment, hate speech, graphic content, and nudity and pornography. Such content violates Facebook's Community Standards and may be removed. Document the violations by saving screen shots. You may also want to document the harassment and call the police.
     
  5. Set the privacy controls for your children's accounts. Follow the tips on Protect Your Privacy and Safety on Facebook.
     
  6. Report abuse occurring in a game or application directly to the developer. Facebook does not have the ability to investigate this activity on its own. Click Contact Developer towards the bottom left of the app's Profile. If the developer is unresponsive, you may click Report Application on the app's About page. You may also want to block the app and the user through the Blocked People and Apps section of Privacy Settings.
     
  7. Do not post your child's full name on your own Facebook page.
     
  8. If you believe a child under the age of 13 is using Facebook, you can report the underage profile with this form.

 

You can request data from your under 13 year old's Facebook account with this form.