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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 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
Most peoples' facebook is locked down to not be publicly viewable, nor is there an expectation that a private chat between two people is "public". That's the same type of logic that made wiretapping of anybody by anybody legal - You're broadcasting your conversation over telephone lines that are public - which is why Congress had to specifically make it illegal.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
"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
it isn't the same logic at all. Facebook isn't even a common carrier.
In this case it isn't the government eavesdropping on your conversation, it is the company that owns the means of communication looking at their own stuff and voluntarily reporting it to the government. That is a significant distinction. In this scenario you'd be free to create your own Facebook and have conversations about illegal activities and no one would find out. If it were as you claim, the government would be monitoring the service you run as well.
'company that owns the means of communication'
So Google has the right to monitor your chats and emails?
'the government would be monitoring the service you run as well'
Without a warrant?
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
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.
Remember this next time you chat to someone about how you got "so wasted" the other night at the bar and the cops show up an hour later to interrogate you on DUI suspicions.
Remember this the next time your 16-year son is simply chatting to someone about smoking pot, and next thing you know you are being served with a search warrant on your home, ransacking your house.
Not all cases of the police surveillance state are as blatantly obvious as a pedophile case. Use your head and understand exactly how this can (and likely will) be abused.
This just reminds me of the whole 'freedom of speech' logic. I run some online fourms, and the whole 'expectation of privacy' fails the exact same way as 'freedom of speech' does. And it comes down to the fact that I, and Facebook, are not the government.
I, as a private citizen, am not required to allow freedom of speech on my privately run forums. And while in generally, I allow people to say what they wish, there are certain discussions my moderators are going to shut down immediately. And I can do this because freedom of speech only guarantees that the GOVERNMENT can't stop you from saying something, not another individual if you happen to be saying it on their servers.
Similarly, the whole expectation of privacy is a government thing. There are indeed certain places that the government can't just gather whatever information it wants about you or spy on you without a court order (or at least can't use any information they gather in court), because you have an expectation of privacy. Private citizens however have no such restriction (except of course if they break another law to gather such information, like breaking into your house). Which means that if you voluntarily use THEIR servers to chat, you have NO expectation of privacy from them, as they are NOT a government either. This is completely besides the fact you agreed to their terms of service for the opportunity to use their servers in the first place. Which I'm sure contains some language about them being able to see and use any and all communications you put on their servers.
Why do people not understand that many of the freedoms in this country, are freedoms that protect us from our government ONLY, not each other?
What more do you think Facebook has to do to make it obvious that it isn't 'most peoples' facebook', it is 'facebook's facebook'?
They changed emails without asking.
They change the page layout without asking.
They record everything you do when at the site and use those data to display specific advertisements.
They delete profiles without asking.
They delete contact data from your phone without asking.
They don't remove profile data, when asked.
They change privacy settings without asking.
They change their privacy policy without asking.
At this point if you are a Facebook user and you believe your activities there aren't exposed to a 3rd party (Facebook itself), you are unfathomably thick headed. Just like with all of the other web based / cloud based storage: the people who own those servers own your stuff. No amount of legal or PR mumbo jumbo changes that. At the top of your comments page here: "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.", is an absolute demonstrable lie and anyone who believes they 'own' their comments in this page is delusional.
If it goes through their servers - yes, they do. However the government can't obtain any such information without a warrant unless Google voluntarily gives said information up. But they could have every chat and email you send through their servers displayed on a big screen in their lunch rooms if they wanted. Legally.
Why would Facebook spend money policing it's patrons and voluntarily reporting misdeeds? They are a "for profit" company, not a social service.
The main difference is the bar doesn't go out of it's way to implement technology to eavesdrop on its patrons. Seems like an awful business model for a bar (unless they are bounty hunters in disguise).
A patron overhearing you in a bar is not the same thing as somebody who works for the bar actively listening for criminal activity. The random person at the bar hearing your criminal activity is the same thing as the "report photo/story" feature in Facebook, which seems to be ok with most of us, but Facebook admins (or bots) crawling through chats isn't.
What you creeping authoritarians don't understand is that when technology changes, it shouldn't result in an erosion by freedom, and hiding behind "constitution only protects us from the government"is douchey.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
So that when legislators start asking questions about their violations of user privacy, they can point at examples like this to show how it's really "for the children" and in support of our fine laws and all that drek, maybe?
This is true and a fair point, but if people can't be bothered to take a few minutes to understand that by using Facebook even posting things as "private" or using their "private" chat feature, they are giving up whatever they are posting to Facebook, that is there own fault and I have no sympathy for them :)
Maybe this sort of thing will even help to increase people's knowledge and people will stop being dumb when using social networks.
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
Yeah. Google doesn't because its bad for business. For Facebook, there may be backlash from the regular (no pedophilic) community, but dumbed down because they say this is being used to catch pedophiles and criminals and not to just randomly read up on peoples conversations. Then again, most people on Facebook don't care about privacy and like to have their thoughts seen (the Wall).
Not "should", but "could"... except that doing so was explicitly made illegal, so that's not a fair analogy.
[pedantic] There's still the issue of data protection. In the UK any kind of personally identifying information can only be accessed by employees with a need to - if I, as a Google employee (which I'm not), decided to start reading an ex-girlfriends emails then that would almost certainly be a breach of the law, unless of course I'd been asked to for some reason (troubleshooting Gmail or whatever). [/pedantic]
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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
You'll have to explain the relevance of that to me. The Congress referred to is the US legislature, is it not? Can you explain Facebook's affiliation to Congress? How has anybody's right to free speech been abridged by Facebook monitoring the said speech and reporting evidence of wrongdoing to the authorities?
I honestly don't know why anybody has any expectation of privacy on the Facebook site. It's a corporation whose only obligation is to its stockholders. It only has a privacy policy at all insofar as not having one will drive some people away from its site which will decrease its value in the eyes of its customers (the advertisers).
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
This article is about facebook CHAT. Facebook chat is between 2 people. You are not talking about what this article is talking about, but something completely different. Try again.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Of course it's a completely fair analogy. The law doesn't change what the situation is: A conversation between 2 people in a medium that is not thought to be exposed to any other people.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Because if they don't, things may become much more difficult for them. They really don't want local police or FBI pulling Megaupload on them and grabbing all their servers as evidence next time some crime is investigated.
Ok, so why stop at pedophilia / ephebophilia? Why not report people openly admitting to smoking marijuana, or underage persons talking about drinking, or people with active lifestyle pictures when they're claiming disability?
Facebook is pulling the opposite direction and it's eventually going to cost them. If they get in the business of being pro-active in stopping crime, they're only going to wind up beholden to being pro-active in stopping all crime. They open themselves to liability, too.
I can see it now, "I had a date and I looked at their Facebook profile but there was no indication they were a rapist, yet during discovery we found a message send 6 years ago about how this guy 'hates women'. Facebook knew this was a dangerous person and made no attempt to warn others."
This is why any sensible online service explicitly disclaims responsibility for monitoring user communications.
More Twoson than Cupertino
So AT&T can listen to your phone conversations and read your text messages? It all goes through their "Servers" (infrastructure in this case).
Saying FaceBook is a public place means that their Privacy settings are irrelevant. Or does Private not mean Private anymore?
As much as men who molest 13 year girls should be castrated and hung, Facebook shouldn't be doing this unless they make clear in the Terms (and I'd say in big notifications when you sign up) that they will watch what you do and if anything looks suspicious, they'll report you.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Could you explain to us how they target advertising next to your email on gmail... if they DON'T monitor your chats and emails?
In my inbox on gmail, I have two messages right now:
The first, from a recruiter I worked with a few years back, asking if I (or anybody I know) are interested in a particular software engineering job that he's trying to find candidates for. The ads displayed next to the email are for:
-- VMware Virtualization
-- Norwich Civil Engineering Masters program
-- Price Waterhouse Cooper consulting on "Succession Planning"
So... a job description with "virtualization" as a requirement; a discussion of "required education" and - generally speaking - a JOB description (for which "succession planning" might be an issue) are the ads.
The second email is a notification from twitter about a message a friend (who I game with occasionally) sent to me, containing a link to a Diablo 3 resource that he thought was really cool. The ads displayed next to that email are for:
-- SproutSocial (the #1 Twitter Marketing Tool!)
-- some other "Twitter management" tool
-- And a list of links: "More on Diablo 2," "More on Diablo 3," and "More on Blizzard games."
So yeah... not only does Google have the "right" to monitor my chats and emails, they are *actively doing it,* because that's how they target their advertising.
> 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!
Common carrier *should* extend to any communication with implied privacy between two parties. Which should include facebook chat, but not facebook wall posts. Unfortunately it doesn't. In no small part due to people like most of the responders to my original post. They don't want to extend the privacy of a phone call to new forms of 2-person communication that are analogous. It's sad how technology erodes peoples' will to be free. Shaking my head...
I don't jibe with the idea that "just because something new is shitty in the way something old wasn't, that it shouldn't be granted the same privacy protections as something old". It was originally legal to intercept telegraph communications as well. It's not moral, correct, or honest.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
>So AT&T can listen to your phone conversations and read your text messages?
That's why UK's Big Brother criminalizes encryption:
> the UK will send its citizens to jail for up to five years if they cannot produce the key to an encrypted data set.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
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.
As much as men who molest 13 year girls should be castrated and hung
I think you meant 'hanged' but hey, maybe there are 13 year old girls who like it that way.
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13 year olds are impressionable and malleable to outside influences
So are most people.
unless you're one of the unlucky ones whose mental maturation process is prematurely halted and never gets to the "adult" stage.
So anyone who disagrees with you has something wrong with their brain and is wrong by definition? Do you have an argument that's not an ad hominem?
I'm not going to argue that it's a good thing for a 30 year old to hook up with a 13 year old, but for something that's supposed to be so obviously bad it's remarkable how weak the arguments against it are.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What more do you think Facebook has to do to make it obvious that it isn't 'most peoples' facebook', it is 'facebook's facebook'?
Or to be a little more pithy, you don't have a page on Facebook. Facebook has a page on you. Insert soviet reference if desired.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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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1. It reflects the mentality of a once 13 year old girl's father.
Who are even less rational than 13 year old girls.
2. If you had, you should be prosecuted for statutory rape and then experience the flip side of the relationship with a large man named Tyrone while serving 10-20 years.
See above. You think forcible anal rape is a just consequence for a pleasurable activity the "victim" assented too? Even if she can't legally consent, her assent still means something. Statutory rape is not a violent crime.
And if she were my daughter, then yes, I would condemn you to castration and death by hanging. But that's just a Dad speaking.
And again, see above. Justice is supposed to be proportional. Something goes wrong in the head of parents that turns totally nice rational people into sick paranoid vengeful freaks. Shame on you, you're even more twisted than the man in the article.
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Next thing you know the US postal service will mandate that eveyone send their mail on postcards so it can be read. If you aren't doing anything wrong, why woudn't you mind anyone reading your messages? /sarcasm.
This was sarcasm, but it brings up a fundamental disastrous event back in the early days of the Internet. Some jackass at the FCC decided that, unlike the US Mail and the telephone, "the Internet" was not a communications system, and thus not subject to the same sort of privacy or access rights. And here we are now, with an Internet that is used more for communication than anything else.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Even the FBI doesn't consider statutory rape a violent crime:
the "desire to please an authority figure" (drilled into our children's heads from a very young age, as I'm sure you're well aware) supplied by that "authority" figure does factor into these types of relationships.
That's the real problem. We teach children not to stand up to authority. Teach children to question authority at every opportunity, and we'd have a much better world. We should be teaching that logic is logic, and if you have a good argument it doesn't matter what age anyone is. Deference to authority is one of the worst vices there is, and we encourage it in our children.
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