Facebook adds child protection "panic" button

Facebook has bowed to pressure and provided a new application which allows young users to report suspicious behaviour, according to Yahoo News.

Beginning Monday, the application allows youngsters to report suspicious behaviour to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) in the UK and Facebook.

The launch of the service marks a turnaround for Facebook which initially resisted calls for a so-called panic button after the murder of a teenage girl in 2009 was linked to the site.

At the time, Facebook said its own protection mechanisms were sufficient.

Following the murder of Ashleigh Hall by serial rapist Peter Chapman, CEOP was putting pressure on the social networking site to install a panic button feature. Initially, Facebook resisted instead it added a 24-hour police hotline to pass UK reports to the CEOP Centre and spent £5 million (about $7.6 million USD) on education and awareness programs.

Users of the social networking site will from Monday be able to bookmark the ClickCEOP service or add it as an application by going to http://www.facebook.com/clickceop.

An automatic advert for ClickCEOP will also appear on the homepage of every Facebook user listed as between 13 and 18 years old.