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Facebook Scans Chats and Posts For Criminal Activity
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has added sleuthing to its array of data-mining capabilities, scanning your posts and chats for criminal activity. If the social-networking giant detects suspicious behavior, it flags the content and determines if further steps, such as informing the police, are required. Reuters provides an example of how the software was used in March: 'A man in his early 30s was chatting about sex with a 13-year-old South Florida girl and planned to meet her after middle-school classes the next day. Facebook's extensive but little-discussed technology for scanning postings and chats for criminal activity automatically flagged the conversation for employees, who read it and quickly called police. Officers took control of the teenager's computer and arrested the man the next day.'"
Why is it so weird that they're doing this? If you went into a bar and talked to folks about having sex with the underage, and someone overheard you, there's a chance that you'd get your ass handed to you, as well as have the cops called to take you away. What's different about facebook doing it? And who the hell relinquishes such personal, and incriminating information on a public server? I know it's not a public server, but it works just like a public bar that's privately owned.
why facebook has become unhip. While I've got no sympathy whatever for this particular individual, the reality is that the filters are completely opaque, and copyvio, sedition, and heresy are all crimes in various jurisdictions that facebook does business. Thus, according to the precedents already in play, if a person in Germany says something that offends the pope, he can be arrested and extradicted. The list can be extended almost indefinitely.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
..on Facebook outsourcing moderation of content. Chat isn't such a stretch from this.
http://yro.slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=worst+paid+job+on+facebook
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Officers took control of the teenager's computer and arrested the man the next day.
What does this mean? As a typical /. user I skimmed the links.....
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..." -- George Orwell, "1984", chapter 5
[Bollywood dance number spontaneous erupts]
Depends on the country. In Canada we have a law that states talking to a under-age person online in such a way that gains there trust and theoretically would put you in a good position to proposition them in the future is illegal (note: even if you had proof that you never planned to meet them in person, it still counts as illegal [and at least technically they do not need proof that you ever planed on doing anything beyond being nice]).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The only think that astonishes me about this story, is that anybody is surprised by it.
The sweeping changes that took place post 9/11, and continue to take place, are delivering us inexorably into the stuff of fiction.
Why was he arrested for planning to have sex with her? Is that now illegal?
It's a matter of legal philosophy. Most Americans want the police to stop crimes from happening, not to just track down and arrest criminals after a crime is committed.
It's not just child abuse. You can be arrested for trying to buy drugs from an undercover police officer. You can be arrested for conspiring to murder someone. You can be arrested for planning to blow up a building.
Palm trees and 8
Please cite the criminal law section that says that.
I'm concerned that Facebook could end up flagging something as illegal that is really an inside joke between friends. I make lots of jokes about illegal activities with friends. They're usually about violent crimes or hard drugs rather than sex crimes, but still... We know each other well enough to catch the sarcasm. But sarcasm doesn't always show through very well in text when being read by strangers.
Now, every victim could potentially sue Facebook for not protecting them from predators. "We read news report about Facebook monitoring our chats and catching the criminals. It is all Facebook's fault I lied to my parents, played hookey with school and took a bus to Middle Ofnowhere from Gated Condos, Florida". And every false positive could end up with a suit against Facebook for slander, loss of reputation. And privacy advocates could sue Facebook for violation expectations of privacy. It looks like an all around lose-lose-lose proposition. Why are they doing it?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Depends on the country. In Canada we have a law that states talking to a under-age person online in such a way that gains there trust and theoretically would put you in a good position to proposition them in the future is illegal (note: even if you had proof that you never planned to meet them in person, it still counts as illegal [and at least technically they do not need proof that you ever planed on doing anything beyond being nice]).
So Canada has banned sports coaching, youth clubs and activities, not to mention teaching children under 18?
And you can't talk to your friends' kids, either.
Wow.
Oh, yeah, and it's *their* trust in this context.
no taxation without representation!
There is a difference between thought crimes and real crimes.
Thinking about underage sex doesn't get you arrested.
Making active preparations - he'd arranged to meet her - does.
And the companies aren't helping by acting as judge jury and executioner.
hyperbolic and incorrect; they merely acted as informants.
Just because he talked about sex doesn't make him guilty. Unless he actually went to the school, convinced her and they had sex then should actually be prosecuted.
The most facebook should have done is alerted the parents and then have a heart to heart talk with the man.
If I ever come across a plot to kill you, Mr AC, I'll bear that in mind, and keep the information to myself until after the murder. It's what you would have wanted.
no taxation without representation!
"gays should be allowed to marry"
"By your logic, necrophiliacs and bestiality practitioners should be allowed to marry"
"marijuana should be legal"
"By your logic, plutonium and ricin should be legal"
"private servers are not subject to free speech rules meant to prohibit the government's intrusive actions because private servers aren't the government"
"By your logic, cell phones should spy on you"
it's called the slippery slope, and when you engage in it, you lose an argument. because depending upon the slippery slope to make your point means you are depending upon human beings not able to tell the difference between very different things. that i, or the law, can't tell the difference between a gay person and a necrophiliac. that i, or the law, can't tell the difference between marijuana and plutonium. that i, or the law, can't tell the difference between a web server chat board and a cell phone. bullshit
therefore, you've lost the argument
it's your right to think it is douchey. it is also the letter of the law and completely in line with the intentions of the founding fathers, because they understood the difference between private property and the government. do you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Would they of their own volition narc on a pot sale? Or a direct action protest? Or someone that didn't pay a use tax on an out-of-state purchase? Wouldn't they have to, else be accused of picking and choosing which laws they help to enforce?
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
MSN Messenger also censors their chat traffic, though I wouldn't pretend to know if it's to this startling degree. They do do active scanning and will silently drop and reformat messages containing keywords (and technology) they don't like. Here is an example of a URL which will be dropped if you send it through MSN Messenger:
http://writingjunkie.net/images/stlouis10-18-08/obama-cool-again.jpg
Yet another reason for ubiquitous crypto usage in IM. Use a libpurple-based client with OTR (Pidgin, Adium) and you can avoid much of this mess.
I like music
>This is private communication between two-parties over a telecommunications system,
The ECPA gives operators an "out" by letting them view traffic as a part of their duties as operators.
Without a stated privacy policy, an operator can only get in trouble by targeting specific people and literally going out of his way to view streams of live communication not related to getting the job done, but that's hard to prove. And if there is a policy saying that they have access to your data, well, expect no privacy. It's been this way for a long time, ever since the BBS days. Remember those blanket "expect no privacy" statements that suddenly appeared on login at Joe's single-line BBS at 1200bps in 1986? 26 long years.
From the Facebook private policy itself:
This here, also could be construed as protecting the right of a 13 year old to be free from online stalking.
That last bit is a catch-all for what they're doing. What they don't tell you is that if they see anything untoward, they will call the cops.But they don't have to. They just have to tell you that they can see your stuff. Joe, back in 1986 might have called the cops if he saw someone stalking a 13 year old on his BBS or maybe not. Maybe Joe wouldn't want the bullshit of dealing with the police that wouldn't even comprehend what he was doing, but he would have been within his rights to do so.
If you're going to communicate privately, Facebook is not the way to do it. It should be obvious by the fact that chat messages do not disappear into the aether, but rather get archived on your page. If you want your messages to disappear into the aether, use a service and protocol that is forgetful, like even something as simple as ytalk (fancy versions of this we call old style instant messaging like ICQ).
It's not Facebook's fault that people, through their ignorance (wilful or not), don't use the correct tools.
FFS, if i want to talk about something private, i take it to a server in Denmark or set up a chat on the localhost.
Here, set up a chat server on the localhost: http://unite.opera.com/application/182/
And there you go. If you want privacy, you don't stand in the middle of the fucking Mall shouting your private friggin' business in real life. Why do it online?
>Where are the feds?
Being appreciative of Facebook's service and trolling /r/gonewild
--
BMO
What's needed is a HTML5 Facebook access app that would layer on top of a Facebook session and encrypt everything typed into any chat or update fields. Enrcypted content would be recognized and decrypted automatically. Otherwise, it would be a transparent layer over Facebook.
You'd want some kind of key management and an easy option for posting without encryption.
Encryption would make conversations much more private, especially the ones you (rightly, IMHO) assume should be private, like messages and chat. A nice side bonus would be ensuring that the communication you were having is the person you think it is.
The fun bonus is that it would make Facebook batshit nuts to lose access to content, since they would not be able to encrypt it.
I suspect this policy creates a liability problem for FaceBook. If I am the victim of a crime and discover that part of its planning was done via FaceBook but they failed to notice or report it, I could perhaps sue them for failing to stop it.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
The slippery slope, as a fallacy, implies that two unrelated things, X and Y can lead from one to the other through a series of intermediary steps. Gay marriage is about consenting adults having the right to make the choice to marry as consenting adults. Therefore it is fallacious to draw a slippery slope comparison to it leading to necrophila as dead people cannot consent. This slippery slope is usually drawn by people who find homosexuality to be against their moral standards and hence they claim that tolerance of one 'immoral' thing is a slippery slope that will lead to other 'immoral' practices being tolerated. From our perspective, this is fallacious, because the argument is about the rights of consenting adults to live together and look after each other as they wish. From their perspective, they see, moral slippage.
A fallacy is only a fallacy when the conclusion is not supported by the premise. A slippery slope does not always have to be fallacious and does not automatically lose the argument--if it can be proven that all the intermediary steps link. In this case, the poster is only responding to the claim that since private companies do not have to respect our privacy rights, they can do anything they want with our data. This is of course incorrect because one form of communication is protected by law and the other one isn't. I'm not even sure if this is a slippery slope argument.
Both forms of communication are frequently owned by private companies, so one can't argue that private companies can do whatever they want. Private companies can only do what they are legally entitled to do. You might say this brings to light the question: if cell phone communications via private companies are protected, why aren't our chats and emails? And since we have privacy settings, or rather the illusion of privacy, it isn't exactly like it is easily made apparent that our private correspondence is anything but private.
It isn't a slippery slope to point out what happens when one's illusion of privacy is invaded. We've seen countless examples of this over the years.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Yes, because now parents may give permission to their children to open a Facebook account after reading this story, thinking that they are going to be protected from sexual predators when, the truth is, there is probably no way to 100% protect kids from this.
> Why was he arrested for planning to have sex with her? Is that now illegal?
In the US, as in most countries, it is not true that it's only a crime if you succeed. So yes, planning to have sex with a 13 year old girl is a real crime.
A "thoughtcrime" (one word, from the book 1984) is an unacceptable belief. No action is required for these bad thoughts to be a crime, just the idea is a crime. He didn't merely have the thoughts, he took actions. Contacting a minor and going to meet her far exceed mere thoughts.
You're free to fantasize about killing your boss, but if you buy a gun and hide in the bushes outside his house and fire the gun at him (but miss), you've still committed a real crime. If attempted murder can be a crime, I don't see why attempted statutory rape wouldn't a crime. In fact, I don't see why soliciting a minor (even if he/she says no) shouldn't be a crime (it is).
Thoughts, ideas and motivations have always been a part of the law. The distinction between first degree (premeditated) murder and second degree murder predates the United States by thousands of years. In order to distinguish accidental and intentional murder, a jury must speculate on the thoughts of the accused. These personal thoughts are revealed through actions. We don't call that "thoughtcrime".
Contacting a minor, making plans to have sex, and going to meet her are all actions that the man took and are obviously illegal.
None of this should be seen as a defense of Facebook for spying on private communications. I just want to clarify that attempting to commit a crime is still a crime.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
While I'm all for catching pedophiles, this is bound to fail long term.
- Criminals now know that Facebook is watching, so they won't communicate on it.
- People talking about victimless "crimes", such as recreational drug usage, on Facebook, will now be suspect to having their lives destroyed because of the company trying to be a "goody two-shoes" and turning them in.
So basically, the value of Facebook as a medium to let loose and express yourself has gone down, with no real long term benefit to catching actual criminals who hurt people.
Please, let's leave criminal investigation to the appropriate authorities. Private companies should not be getting in on the act.
No, Canada has just made it so if you are online the judge can label you a paedophile completely at his discretion. The idea is that it can be used to arrest undesirables that do not break any other laws, because at least for now the government is afraid enough of the people to not be completely unjust.
It was made to close a "loophole" in previous laws that allowed this one man in particular to get off scot free when he proved that he never planed to meet the under-aged girl he was having internet sex with.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Facebook mines data. As they mine data, they are looking to glean each and every bit of useful (read "sellable") data from a user's interactions. In the event that their slicing and dicing of data uncovers something like what we see here with the 30s vs. 13 scenario, I think they are morally accountable to report it to the authorities. It's no different than what everybody was upset at Penn State for with the Sandusky situation. If it ever came to light that Facebook had these details and knowingly chose to do nothing, then you'd have them smeared in the newspapers like Joe Paterno was.
I think it;s commendable for Facebook to "use their powers for good" in this situation. People need to realize that the data Facebook gathers and mines really is theirs (thanks to the EULA), and they can be free to slice and dice it as they please. The concern here is not that Facebook oversteps it's bounds, but rather we need to be cognizant of what data we share, and knowing that it WILL be mined for profit.
For those of you still thinking about buying stock in Facebook, think this through for a bit. They key to making a company profitable is to sell a "product" to a "consumer".
Facebook is interesting in this regard, because some people are not very clear on what the "product" is. Most believe the "product" is this cool social network concept, and that the users of the network are the "consumers". They live in the delusion that Facebook can pay it's bills and such from the abundance of goodwill their users give them each time the log into the site.
In reality, while to social network portion encourages sharing and provides links between people and data, the actual users of Facebook are the "product".
Users can join and use Facebook for free, so no profit for the company is made there. Profit is made for the company by selling user information ("product") to advertisers ("consumers"). As stockholders demand more and more profits, Facebook must come up with newer and more innovative and intrusive ways to gather information from users to sell.
Could this be considered a digital form of larceny? Larceny is defined as "the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods of another from his or her possession with intent to convert them to the taker's own use." Is Facebook not taking the details of every status, every "like", every chat, every picture & image you share online, and mining that data for themselves for a profit?
Now I'm not saying that Facebook is doing anything illegal here. Their Terms of Use clearly define what we, as voluntary users, agree to. However, this does shed some light onto why some decisions from Facebook management don't seem to have the user's best interest in mind. I believe that as more and more people realize that the profitability of the company rests solely on pillaging data from their users, fewer and fewer people will find themselves willing to subject their digital details to such a flogging.
I'm not advocating a boycott of Facebook or anything silly like that. While I enjoy the social aspects of Facebook, and don't mind sharing some of my details, I am also very cautious about what gets posted online.
As an investment choice, Facebook seems a bit risky to me because the amount of data to be mined can be severely impacted by things such as new legislation, one big data loss, password snafu, the emergence of another premier social network, or any other event that causes users to begin to abandon Facebook. Loss of data to be mined would equate to the loss of a product, and the company will begin to crumble under it's own weight.
The US claims to be the home of the free but it really isn't. But it has put the burden of censorship and control on private companies. Take sex, US TV has very little of it. Not because of any laws by the state, that would be censorship. But all the networks censor themselves instead... or... well... they don't want to find out what else, so they censor themselves far more then a state owned broadcaster like the BBC does. The BBC has nudity in family comedies. Unthinkable in the US. State censorship means supervision and control by the public. Private censorship means nobody ultimately is accountable.
In soviet russia, you are not allowed to say anything or the KGB will kill you.
In capitalist russia, you can say whatever you want, just nobody will print it or broadcast it. It is far more effective. Dead people become martyrs. Unpublished people are just nobodies.
It is an old trick of capatilist. You are free to protest but if you do, no mortage and job for you. It ain't government repression if the government isn't doing it.
Think about the app-store and iTunes and Amazon. They have censored material from you but it ain't "real" censorship because they ain't the state. Just an amazing coincedence that the powers that be and the private mega corps have the same ideas about what you should and should not be able to see, hear and think.
Now go and consume like a good little free slave.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Of course you can't say anything bad because you would be condoning statutory rape.
But Facebook is special. They should be under stricter rules than a common carrier even, because they log you in everywhere and know so much about you.
How to catch a statutory rapist? Heavily scan all interactions between minors and adults (FB knows your age) and if any sex-related words hit the filter you have a potential crime. Have an employee read the log to be sure, or just outsource it. Maybe the church or young police trainees will do it for free.
You could write a smart filter to catch drug dealing, or to catch attempted suicide, and so on.
It should be trivial to write a smart filter for any given crime, such as drug dealing, suicide, or perhaps "not crime but against a corporation's interest". Call it facecrime.
For example it is probably trivial for FB to know your employer. Than heavily scan all interactions between competitors' employees. If any suspicious words, perhaps work-related terms appear then there is potential crime again. The RIAA would love this too.
This is such an endlessly useful and potentially lucrative area that I could see FB gaining an income stream from the kind of companies that currently are politicians' major income sources.
I like to pretend my wife is a high priced call girl and pick her up in a bar. With all the other guys she shot down as a bunch of low rent chumps looking on. I know she's not a call girl. She knows she's not a call girl. The onlookers might think they see something going on, but its not. Now, what if one of them is a cop?
Granted, the situation with a 13 year old girl is different, as a 13 yo is presumed not capable of consenting to a sexual relationship. But what if the girl in question wasn't really 13? We have a friend who is petite and has her old Catholic school uniform, which she wears from time to time just for kicks (along with a teddy bear kids backpack). Of course, the 6 inch stripper's platform boots sort of give the look away. But other than that, there goes a clear case of probable cause.
Have gnu, will travel.
For a minuete, take the example given out of the equation and look at the bigger picture. Sex crimes has long been used to stir emotions to get Americans into forgetting all notion of civil liberties. They immediately want us to think this was set up to protect children against pedophiles, but lets be frank, there is a bigger picture.
If Syria, Egypt or libya did this, we'd be up in arms about it. This is nothing more than facebook monitoring users as proxy for the government. Its slightly unsettling. Its a violation of an expectation of privacy.
What happens when that law broken is simple drug use, the so called "unlawful assembly", or other minor crimes used to tar and feather or public humiliate dissedents. Who gets to decide what gets fowarded to the authorities.
Even better, what system is in place to prevent facebook employees using information for their own gain? what about personal gain? what about prying on secrets of competitors for sexual mates? What about revenge?
My phone company repeatedly allows the negotiations of market rigging and insider trading to go on. They fail to notice or report it. Where's their liability?
For a tiny fraction of the ill-gotten profits as a reward, they would be sitting on piles of cash. They wouldn't even have to listen in on the relevant conversations. Simple link mining of call records (which courts have ruled are the telecoms property and may be sold) would reveal many of these negotiations. So lets get with it, Ma Bell.
Have gnu, will travel.
With all the news coverage that Facebook has gotten regarding privacy and the lack thereof, only the truly clueless and stupid could possibly think that there's some kind of expectation of privacy while using facebook in any capacity at all.
Hell, even my mother is nervous about using facebook, and if she was any less technically literate than she is already, she wouldn't have a computer at all.
It's a matter of legal philosophy. Most Americans want the police to stop crimes from happening
Most Americans are not self-aware enough to understand that if the police can arrest other people before they've even committed a crime, they can arrest you too, even if you haven't committed a crime because you might.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Everything you do and say on the internet is subject to monitoring, for right or wrong or good or ill by commercial, government, and possibly criminals (other than "commercial" and "government").
Be smart about what you say and do.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Interesting fact: the age of consent in the U.S. was originally 10 years old, following English common law. Many Americans alive today have great-grandmothers who were married at 12 years of age.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/02/16_going_on_17.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2007/09/the_mindbooty_problem.html
The big problem that Facebook gets into when reporting sexual crimes is where to draw the line. It's a particular problem when you run into the irrational and hysterical laws and prosecutions on sex with young people.
This sounds like the old stories of photo processors who were required to report all photos with "suspicion" of child sex abuse to prosecutors. As you recall, professional photographers were arrested for taking nude pictures of their own children. Parents were arrested for taking bathtub pictures of infants. Parents had their children taken into custody for months. Innocent people had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses to clear themselves. Prosecutors offered the choice of plea bargains or felony charges.
Most of us would be uncomfortable about a 30-year-old man having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but where does it stop? What about a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl (which would be legal in the UK, I believe).
What about a 19-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl? An 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl? I'll leave it to you to visualize the spreadsheets.
What about two 14-year-olds? That's illegal in a lot of states. I bet there are a lot of 14-year-olds arranging sexual activities on Facebook. The last numbers I saw were that 10% of all 14-year-old girls have had intercourse. What are you going to do -- put 10% of the male population in jail?
Here's a more reasonable (medical) definition:
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/psychiatric_disorders/sexuality_and_sexual_disorders/paraphilias.html
Sexual offenses against children constitute a significant proportion of reported criminal sexual acts. Arbitrarily, the age of a person with pedophilia is set at 16 yr, with the age difference between offender and child victim set at 5 yr. The age of the child is usually 13 yr. For older adolescents with pedophilia (ie, 17 to 18 yr old), no precise age difference is specified; clinical and legal judgment is relied on. Legal criteria may be different from psychiatric criteria.
That's reasonable. I think that if you want to prosecute people for having sex, you have to demonstrate that one party was actually harmed. The prosecution shouldn't do more harm than the behavior.
Many much-reported prosecutions are of people who wouldn't fit into that medical definition. 17-year-old boys get prosecuted for having sex with 16-year-old girls. 16-year-olds get prosecuted for having sex with each other. The laws are draconian. Adolescent boys get 10-year prison terms. Teenagers wind up having to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives, drastically limiting where they can live and work. Often, they're forced to plea bargain and accept lifetime sex offender registration or go to trial and risk years in prison. People lose their jobs and have to quit college. The cost of defending yourself against such a prosecution can be tens of thousands of dollars, enough to cost a family its house and its college savings.
The people who pass these laws and prosecute them say that they'll examine each case using "reasonable judgment," and not prosecute "Romeo and Juliet" situations among teenagers, but that's bullshit. There's always some asshole prosecutor who says, "The law says it's rape. Discussion over." Once you start down the roller-coaster of notification and prosecution, there's no turning back.
Many of the defendants are black -- white people, especially wealthy people, have enough influence with the local prosecutors to get out of these situations.
I don't want Facebook reading my personal messages to find out if I wrote something suspicious that they should report to the police. I realize their situation but this will do a lot of damage to a lot of people. First get rational laws on drugs and sex, and then start prosecuting them.