Facebook Scans Chats and Posts For Criminal Activity 483
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.'"
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:2, Informative)
Your analogy isn't a valid. In a chat application, there is an expectation of privacy because the members of the chat are explicitly listed as parties to the chat - your chat partner and yourself. if someone else was a party to the chat, you'd expect to see their name listed in the chat box somewhere.
In a bar, you don't expect the same level of privacy because you know there are people around you.
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:2, Informative)
Two problems with that.
1. the post you replied to was talking about his forum, not a FB chat.
2. The phone company is specifically prohibited from doing that.
So, no, you extrapolation is invalid, and illegal.
It's not a wiretap (Score:4, Informative)
>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/ [opera.com]
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
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Thought Crime (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Informative)
>So AT&T can listen to your phone conversations and read your text messages?
That's why UK's Big Brother criminalizes encryption [falkvinge.net]:
> the UK will send its citizens to jail for up to five years if they cannot produce the key to an encrypted data set.
Re:HTML5 Facebook Encryption Layer (Score:4, Informative)
You just described Pidgin with OTR [cypherpunks.ca].
There appears* to be a Pidgin plugin [google.com] for Facebook. So, Pidgin+OTR, plus convincing whomever you're chatting with to install and enable the same thing, is the solution. Of course, as with most technological problems, the third part of that sequence---the human part---is going to be the hardest problem to solve. The tech exists, if only people would use it.
* I can't test any of this to see if it works because I don't have a Facebook account and never will.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:3, Informative)
1. It reflects the mentality of a once 13 year old girl's father.
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.
3. If you were so lucky, then she should also be sent to jail.
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Informative)
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.