British Police Use Facebook to Gather Evidence

Amy Bennett writes "Move over police scanner and most-wanted poster. The Greater Manchester Police force has created a Facebook application to collect leads for investigations. The application delivers a real-time feed of police news and appeals for information. A 'Submit Intelligence' link takes a Facebook user to the police Web site where they can anonymously submit tips. Another link leads to the videos on YouTube featuring information on the police force, ongoing investigations and other advisories." As reader groschke writes, though, "Their access to user data raises significant civil liberties problems. They may be able to see more of your data than your friends or network members can — and you also expose your friends' data when you add the application. All without needing a subpoena or warrant."

Comments

Re:Taken way out of context

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, *everything* is always supposed to be about helping the police catch criminals. Have you ever seen a politician say "we want to limit your freedoms for no particular reason other than that we can"?

I'm not sure whether this particular story is big or not, but to say that it isn't because the police claim it's only about catching criminals... that's breathtakingly naive.

Dear everyone else

[Anonymous Coward]

We hope you take this as a sign that you should stop using Facebook.

Sincerely, Internet users who don't care for circlejerks.

Re:What are we really policing here?

[kraut]

Since it seems unlikely people on Facebook are going to confess to be being a major drug trafficker, or show video clips of their last home invasion rape and robbery, I can't really see the value to society of wasting law enforcement resources clogging up the criminal justice system with the parade of Facebook petty crimes.

In the UK we seem to have plenty of stupid criminals. A group of people beating someone up while filming it on their mobiles, and posting the evidence on social networking sites seems to be a common habit amongst our more detestable yoofs.

I don't know about the UK, but here in the states our criminal justice system is full. We have enough people in jail, more than enough people getting tagged with arrest records over fairly minor infractions. We need law enforcement to focus on the big problems and not be looking for reasons to dump some otherwise law-abiding person into the criminal justice meat grinder because they copped to some petty crime in Facebook.

And we need to de-criminalize a wide swath of drug possession crimes. We're spending billions keeping people in jail for a few oz's of pot. It's really quite insane.

Yeah and Amen, brother. Good luck getting anyone in power to listen to the evidence though.