Meta is introducing new privacy settings on Facebook and Instagram to protect teenagers from harm online.
For starters, the company is now testing ways to protect teens from messaging suspicious adults they aren’t connected to. Suspicious accounts, according to Facebook, are accounts that belong to an adult that may have recently been blocked or reported by a young person. These accounts will not be shown in teens' "People You May Know" section. The company is also testing removing the message button on teens’ Instagram accounts when they’re viewed by suspicious adults.
Also, Facebook accounts created by teens under the age of 16 (or under 18 in certain countries) will automatically default to "more private settings", which will affect:
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Who can see their friends list
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Who can see the people, Pages and lists they follow
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Who can see posts they’re tagged in on their profile
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Reviewing posts they’re tagged in before the post appears on their profile
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Who is allowed to comment on their public posts
Teens that are already on Facebook will be encouraged by the app to enable these settings as well. This move follows a similar move by Instagram last year to make teen accounts private by default.
What's more, Meta will now prompt teens to report accounts to Facebook or Instagram after they block someone. It will also send safety notices with information on how to navigate inappropriate messages from adults.
"In just one month in 2021, more than 100 million people saw safety notices on Messenger. We’ve also made it easier for people to find our reporting tools and, as a result, we saw more than a 70% increase in reports sent to us by minors in Q1 2022 versus the previous quarter on Messenger and Instagram DMs."
Finally, Meta is working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to stop the non-consensual sharing of the intimate images of teens, especially when these images are used in "sextortion". This is a type of crime wherein someone threatens to distribute a person's private material if they don’t do them sexual favors or give them money.
The upcoming platform, operated by NCMEC, will allow teens to create a private report for images on their devices they don’t want shared (via Engadget). It will then create a unique hash of the image(s), which would go into a database. This helps Facebook detect if the images are shared on the platform. According to Facebook, the platform will be similar to the system it has already implemented to prevent the non-consensual sharing of intimate images for adults.
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