It's about education
Kids and Teens and their media habits have changed: They use the Internet quite a bit (as much as four or five hours a day), and they are revealing personal details. If you learn it as a child, it comes somewhat naturally. The popularity of social network sites has exploded over the last years, and this is a very large market, of course. Primary goals of the companies offering social network platforms remain selling and advertising, and also data mining. Marketing to kids and abusing collected data is simply common and not judged as ethically questionable anymore. The Chaos Computer Club recently published a statement (German) showing how weak the security and privacy settings of such a website (especially designed for teens) is that should prevent third parties from seeing all the photos, messages and stuff that kids post. In fact, in this case there wasn't any serious security in place at all. And it is only one example of many. This is exactly where education comes in. Not make the classic mistake of thinking that this could never happen to your kids and their private data. You don't want your teen's bullying and harassing of peers and teachers or texts about you ranting about your boss archived for the next eternity. At least let them use screen names. But better keep this material off such a network.
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