Profiling High-School Students with Facebook

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 14:12:02 -0500

Facebook is one of the more popular social networking sites among teenager users. In an attempt to protect teenagers who use online social networks, congress passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in 1998 to protect minors.

A recent study by NYU IGERT advisor professor Keith Ross along with IGERT trainee Ratan Dey and doctoral student Yuan Ding, demonstrated that COPPA and individual networks’ precautions may actually increase minors’ risk. The study shows the law and minimum age requirements create an incentive for kids to lie about their age and therefore puts them in danger. The study also demonstrates that an attacker with modest computation resources can create extensive profiles of most of the minors in any target high school