Facebook, CEOP team for teen "panic button" app

Facebook has teamed with the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), and will be providing a Facebook app that will serve as a sort of "panic button," allowing teenagers an easy to report cyberbullying and other such incidents. The tool will be advertised on the home pages of teenage Facebook users.

While Facebook and other social networking sites have become examples of the new age of childhood bullying, with some such incidents ending up in suicide. CEOP asked social networking sites to add the button last year, but although Bebo and MySpace did so, Facebook resisted at first, claiming its own reporting tools were sufficient.

However, after Ashleigh Hall, 17, "met" a 33-year-old sex offender posing as a teenaged boy on Facebook, only to be raped and murdered, pressure was ratcheted up. Additionally, it was reported that 44 police chiefs in the U.K. signed a petition in favor of CEOP's idea.

The app, ClickCoep, launched on Monday. The tool will be advertised on the home pages of teenage Facebook users. Install the app and you get a ClickCEOP tab in your profile, which seems to be the only level of integration with Facebook itself, as it really just get a Facebook page that links to the CEOP Report Center.

In addition, you can gain better coverage overall by using the browser add-ons which would allow such reporting from any site. We previously covered IE8's add-on.

Still, given the fact that Facebook will advertise this on teen users' home pages, it will probably be a more apparent aid to such users. However, one might wonder if it might be a good idea to put up the same sort of ad on those users who have teenage children?