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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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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