By Vijay @ 11:46PM.
The Delhi High Court Tuesday asked
social networking site Facebook to upload a disclaimer on its home page that
children below the age of 13 years cannot open an account on it. A
division bench of Acting Chief Justice B.D. Ahmed and Justice Vibhu Bakhru asked
Facebook to not allow children under 13 years from opening an
account. Senior advocate Parag Tripathi appearing for Facebook assured the
court that the site “will upload the disclaimer on its home page that children
13 years can not open the account”.
“You (Facebook) can write on the
home page in bold letters that children below 13 are not allowed. There is no
harm in doing this…,” the court said. The court also asked the central
government to tell it as to what law it had for the online protection of children
from being abused through social networking sites. The judges also asked
the government to inform them on provisions in the law related to a minor using
a social networking site.
“In India what is the law for a
minor to use Facebook? Is it 13, 16, 18 or no law? What is the requirement
under Indian law for Facebook?” the court asked from the central government’s
counsel who in turn told it that in US the age to use social networking sites
is 13 years.
“You don’t have a law for protection
of minor on social networking sites? You are behind the time…the world has gone
much ahead,” the court said. The court was hearing a plea that said minors
were allowed to open an account with social networking sites, including
Facebook, which was illegal as Indian laws don’t permit it.
The public interest litigation was
filed by former Bharatiya Janata Party ideologue K.N.
Govindacharya. Appearing for Govindacharya, lawyer Veerag Gupta told the
court that the recent incident in Gurgaon where a police found children involved
in a sex and smoke party was the latest outcome of the non-compliance of
guidelines by Facebook. He added that hundreds of minor children gathered
through Facebook for the party.
He said that Facebook and Google did
not even have any email account to lodge complaint about minors misusing social
networking sites. Facebook also filed a reply on the plea and said that
its terms and conditions “specifically prohibit children under 13 years of age
from registering a Facebook account and using Facebook services.”
“The condition forbids users from
providing any false information on Facebook, creating an account for anyone
other than him/herself without permission, or creating more than one personal
account,” the reply added.
Minors can only share content with
friends, friends of those friends, and network (such as the school they attend,
whereas adult can share content with all the Facebook users, the reply said,
adding that the site has different privacy settings for minors.
Google, in its reply, said that before
opening an account with social networking sites, one had to open an email
account and for opening that he or she had to mention the age and if the user
was below 13 years, he could not open an account with social networking
sites. It added that Google had already put in place a plethora of steps
on the issue of safe usage of the Internet.
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