Child protection is now a huge issue for social networking sites. I'd call it a hot potato, except I doubt it's going to cool down and it has a long history already (chat rooms, etc).

LunarStorm, Sweden's No. 1 social networking site, has spent 10 years working on the isssue. The UK offshoot's CEO, Matt Colebourne, spoke to Pocket-lint recently about how it works.

LunarStorm operates a three-pronged approach on its site to monitor its users continuously.

At the first layer are the volunteers, whom Colebourne likens to trusted school prefects. "It was one of these volunteers that spotted that a 23-year-old and a 11-year-old were having a wholly inappropriate conversation, and we were able to resolve that."

Full-time staff form the second layer of offense who monitor security and privacy continually. They're backed up by smart, proprietary software that flags and reports potentially dangerous behaviour to staff.

LunarStorm is also a founder member of OnComm, a collaborative project between the social network sites reporting deviant or strange behaviour to law enforcement agencies in order to track or build a case against predators.

If blog comments to BusinessWeek from 16 and 17 year olds on the theme are anything to go by, young users are generally not too bothered. This one was pretty typical:
"I think that it's dumb that people blame Myspace for everything that's going on with kids being kidnapped or whatever. It's the kid's choice to give this information to the person! I mean, come on."

But it's not the kind of comment to play well to parents, who probably mainly agree with Colebourne's view "Children aren't left unmonitored on a playground or in a school, so why should they be online?"

Politically, and in the longer term commercially, other sites that attract school-age kids will have to show that they are adopting best practice, so LunarStorm's model is very likely to have a widespread influence - and that means publicity, which could also give the site a big boost in the younger market as their parents, or those who want to feel safer, hear about it.

It could well be that most kids are more safety-savvy online than adults, though. A story from KCBS radio (3.7.06):

San Jose, Calif. (KCBS) -- San Jose Police are on the look out for the so-called "Craigslist Robber" who reportedly tracked down his victims by using the community website.

The suspect has struck four times in the past week using the same method of operation while targeting Craigslist users.

"He's pretending to want to sell something or buy something from these folks. He's arranging meetings with them at various spots in town in San Jose," said San Jose Police spokesman Nick Muyo.