Social Media a Threat To Undercover Cops

angry tapir writes "Facebook has proven to be one of the biggest dangers in keeping undercover police officers safe, due to applications such as facial recognition and photo tagging, according to an adjunct professor at ANU and Charles Sturt University. Mick Keelty, a former Australian Federal Police commissioner, told the audience at Security 2011 in Sydney that because of the convergence of a number of technologies undercover policing may be 'impossible' in the future."

Comments

Here's an idea.

[ryanmcdonough]

Don't have a public profile and don't go out with friends and have them publicly tag your photos. Just an idea.

Re:Here's an idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't have a public profile and don't go out with friends and have them publicly tag your photos. Just an idea.

But that takes actual communication with your friends, something social networking replaced.
Nowadays it's not hip to have common sense, basic reasoning skills or actually interact with friends any further than surface banter aimed to make you look cool to nobodies.

Re:Here's an idea.

[Nirvelli]

They already do. It is, however, a bit hard to get to.

Re:Here's an idea.

[Opportunist]

Old hacker's law dictates that any backdoor the police may have to any system will be abused, not only by the police but also by people who are smarter than the average cop who has to use the backdoor.

In other words, if you offer this service to the police, it will soon be abused by people who craft identities for other, even worse, purposes.

Mis-Tag, False ID

[retroworks]

You create a fake Facebook profile and mistag-yourself everywhere. You have a police department staff scan photos and mistag you. With a little more effort, Facebook could become the best thing that ever happened for people setting up false identities. But Facebook has to let you mis-tag yourself. I started a Facebook Group "Data Camouflage Anonymous" for the purpose of mis-tagging and mis-identifying photos (to water down the facial recognition database) and within a day found my "tagging" ability turned off by Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/groups/151915044879668/ Facebook should be no more reliable at facial data than they are at birthday records (which are a joke).

Re:Here's a better idea.

[Vintermann]

If you have the apparatus to infiltrate criminal organizations, you have the apparatus to infiltrate political organizations too.

You CAN do a lot to criminal organizations without infiltration. Infiltration has a high cost, in the form of increased paranoia, tribality and possibly brutality in the infiltrated groups. This worsens crime, and lessens defection.

Also, infiltration has a cost in the other direction - what it does to police departments and infiltrators themselves. When the police get used to betraying people's trust as part of their job, they start doing that in other ways, too. Adopting such means really is a slippery slope.