Here’s a summary of the latest action. See below for more:
1) Sour grapes for Parakey investors; they get no Facebook stock
2) Facebook facing legal trouble back East, this time for child-safety issues
3) Amazon launches Amazon MP3, a competitor to iTunes
4) Private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson buys Vault.com
Facebook facing legal trouble back East, this time for child-safety issues — Undercover investigators from the New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo’s office set up fake Facebook profiles posing as minors, found pornographic images and videos, and were repeatedly solicited by adult sexual predators. The office announced a full investigation yesterday, saying that Facebook’s safety features and its responses to complaints did not adequately address the issues.
True, the company is in hyper-growth mode, averaging 200,000 new users per day since January, and now has more than 42 million active users.
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Still, being busy is no excuse for dealing with the exposure of children to pedophiles or others asking them for nude pics. Myspace has been in the spotlight for this problem for years, which Facebook managed to mostly avoid it while its core user base was college students. “If you wanted to stalk a young girl on Facebook, it would be very, very easy,” Myspace owner Rupert Murdoch said at a conference last week.
Facebook might want to check out Keibi, a newly-launched software service designed specifically to help social networks’ customer service teams find and delete porn faster. Facebook isn’t new to legal cases: Add this latest to the Massachusetts court case brought against Facebook by rival ConnectU, which claims that it invented online social networking on college campuses. And Facebook has been criticized for moving too slowly to address other sensitive issues, such dealing with its anti-Islam group.
Amazon launches Amazon MP3, a competitor to iTunes — Techmeme has more.
Private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson buys Vault.com — Vault.com provides surveys and other career information for a range of professional industries: investment banking, consulting, law, government, media and others. The majority-stake investment values the company at between $60 and $85 million, the Wall Street Journal reports.
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