People looking to get a little bit statutorily rapey on Facebook are going to find that an increasingly tougher row to hoe. Following the lead of MySpace, the social networking site has agreed to a series of safety measures designed to keep mixing between legal users and jail bait to a minimum.

A nice gesture to be sure, but we have a hard time believing that the proposed rules will have any significant effect. According to the New York Times, users under the age of 18 will now be required to affirm that they have read Facebook's safety tips when they sign up (read: they might have to check a box!) The company has also promised to "more prominently offer safety tips" (read: bigger font!), and said that it will no longer let people change their ages from over 18 to under 18 without review. The last rule certainly makes sense, but it seems easy enough to simply create a new profile and evade detection altogether.

Facebook also announced that it is working on developing "behavioral technology to weed out fibbers," technology that could, say, let the site know when someone has a disproportionate number of friends outside their own age. How they plan on monitoring the behavior of these flagged people, however, is unclear, and could raise a whole new battery of privacy concerns similar to the ones the company faced regarding its failed Beacon advertising initiative.

We can't wait for the day when Facebook and MySpace finally do figure out a way to effectively take pedophiles offline and put them back on the streets, where they can't do so much harm.