Is facebook.com Safe?

Caveat Emptor: While Entertaining, Facebook has to be carefully handled. It is heavily targeted with spam, phishing, and is very likely an experimental ground for all new techniques of social engineering and malware propagation. On its own it is never child-safe. But, from a different standpoint, it presents a good place for mentoring and education on how to analyze and differentiate various inputs from social sources.

I love facebook, for myself. However, I don't think any child should be allowed to use facebook. I rated facebook fairly low because there is no privacy (if you don't know how to properly protect your privacy on facebook). Kids can get into a lot of serious situatuions with people they don't know (molesters, kidnappers). Overall facebook for AN ADULT is awesome! For children, I don't think it's good at all.

This is a great site to connect with friends and post pictures but it can be dangerous at the same time. Kids might give away valuable information like where they live so make sure a responsible child uses the site. Some people even post viruses which can be dangerous to your computer if you carelessly click on it. So be aware and do not click on links that look suspicious.

While the Facebook service in and of itself is not malicious or abusive, their recent decisions regarding selling you to advertisers more so than they have done are quite disconcerting. You also have to take into account the questionable applications that anyone can produce and in turn have access to your information even after discontinuing permissions for the application. These have proliferated far and wide including plays on the Facebook name and reputation itself to get you to accept and install the application.