Lawsuit filed against Facebook by father of 12-year-old

A father whose 12-year-old daughter posted suggestive poses of herself on her account has filed a lawsuit against Facebook.

Children under the age of 13 are not allowed to join the social networking site under current rules, but thousands of underage kids across the UK easily get around this rule by changing their date of birth.

The suit was filed in Belfast, Northern Ireland on Monday and accuses the social networking site of “negligence”.

The family solicitor said that the girl posted the pictures herself, which showed her to be “heavily made up” and looking older than her years.

The girl was under the care of the Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Trust at the time she posted the images and as such, they have also been named as defendants.

Facebook has said in the past that preventing children using the site is a mammoth and all but impossible task.

Whilst many parents of under-13s allow their children to use the site, it is to be hoped that most would have rules in place that allow them to monitor their child’s activity.

The solicitor for the family in the lawsuit believes that the site should only be made available to over-18s, which seems to be an unrealistic ideal in the modern, connected world.

The solicitor, Hilary Carmicheal, told the BBC that Facebook is unable to implement the current rules and suggested that they could easily do so by asking for a child’s passport number.

Child protection expert Jim Gamble told the BBC: “It is a complex set of relationships because, of course there is a duty of care for the company, a clear duty of care for parents and a clear duty of care for anyone in whose care a child is put.”

He added that this would prove to be an interesting case.

Mr Carmichael has set up a separate website asking parents who are concerned that their child’s “rights have been infringed” to come forward.

The front page of the site sets out the laws surrounding child privacy and says: “The law of the United Kingdom does not permit the misuse of private information relating to a child”.

How clear the law is on this issue, when the child has freely entered information with or without the consent of a parent, remains to be seen.

The child’s father in the case claims that his daughter has been put at risk of sexual abuse, and that he had previously taken down an account she had set up. However, the girl in question simply set up another one.