Facebook has spent more than $6,600 lobbying California state officials to negate the Social Networking Privacy Act which will impose penalty on social networking sites for displaying personal details of children under 18.

A recent survey by Consumer Reports found that as many as 7.5 million kids lie about their age to use Facebook.

If the parents of these children request a site to remove any information about a user, the site must comply with this request within 48hours or face a $10,000 fine.

This implies that the users would have to set privacy settings as soon as they join the website and not later.

Facebook along with other social networking websites have argued that prohibiting sites from displaying peoples’ address and telephone number would have “unintended consequences,” hurt businesses and force privacy choices on users.

Tammy Cota, the executor director of the Internet Alliance trade association stated in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the bill “would force users to make decisions about privacy and visibility of all information well before they even used the service for the first time, and in such a manner that they are less likely to pay attention and process the information.”

A bunch of social networking websites including Facebook, Google, Twitter and Match.com have submitted a formal letter of opposition to the plans.

Last year, David Gould and Mike Robertson sued Facebook claiming that Facebook violated its own privacy policy by using users’ ID numbers in headers created when they clicked on ads.

Facebook Judiciary Facebook Software