Is a Government Watchdog the right thing to polcie what happens on the net? Will it keep bad stuff off Facebook? Or will any oversight in the wrong hands become a draconian regime of over-regulation. Today, I spoke to David Vaile, the Executive Director of the Cyber Law Centre at UNSW – in fact I whacked him on the radio at the ABC.

I produced Richard Glover’s Drive program around Sydney today. Recriminations were growing louder against Facebook for not taking strong enough action after the memorial sites for two dead Queensland kids were defaced with porn and offensive comments. And in another instance in Queensland, a Facebook user is claiming to be able to deliver a long-lost missing boy Daniel Morcombe, if the group attracts 1 million members. The Premier there has warned Facebook will loose popularity if they don’t do more to reduce offensive material.

It’s a serious question: If something happens to you or your family online, who do you complain to? Can you pick up the phone and call someone? What about this idea: an online ombudsman – a kind of referee of the Internet. Would that make you feel safer?

That’s what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he will look at.

The social networking giant will apologise, it says, and respond directly to the Queensland Government, but they say it’s hard to control individual actions on its site.

David Vaile is the Executive Director of the Cyber Law Centre at UNSW, and we interviewed him today about if this is a good idea.

The main problem, David says, is that it’s a fast moving thing, predicated on the disclosure of personal information. ‘It’s a very profitable model for them,’ he said, ‘and a lot of people particularly young people find that to be a lot of fun.’

But with increased level of the use of personal information, more risks are generated, and young people ‘have difficulty joining the dots’.

‘You may not realise that you’re hurting them… or yourself’, David said about young users of Facebook, who face a fundamental lack of understanding of the consequences online, which can push right out to criminal behaviour like stalking, harassment, and claiming responsibility for crimes.

On the other hand, he said ‘there’s a great danger that adults get into a complete panic’. While it’s tempting to lump Facebook with trying to regulate the darker stuff put up by users, David said ‘it’s not the role of Facebook to play the role of a policeman.’

It’s a balancing act, David argues, between keeping online businesses free flowing and profitable (and with 7 million users, and millions of individual transactions every day, that’s important), and picking up what different communities around the world find unacceptable.

The problem: ‘The earlier you to get it, the more expensive it is… it’s a real commercial issue,’ he said. ‘The reality is that you need a small trouble-shooting call-centre’.

Eariler, from my notes, David didn’t think putting an ombudsman in charge was a good idea. The regular ‘needs to be activist’, he told me, to achieve results on behalf of the public, like it has been in Canada. The status quo right now in Australia is decidedly un-activist, David told me.

He called it ‘another magic bullet… holding up something heroic’. But nothing can replace the more prosaic approach of educating young people about the consequences of what they do online while still protecting people’s right to privacy.

Another layer of bureaucracy won’t be the panacea.