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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
"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
I suppose that means the police either physically confiscated the teenager's computer or Facebook has the ability to change her credentials so that the police logged in as her.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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
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
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?
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
>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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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