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.'"
Facebook is a public place (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
And people wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
1984 in real time (Score:5, Insightful)
"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
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And people wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
There were stories detailing the moderation system there recently, and a lot of this "moderation" is taking place in other countries. This has led to a lot of cultural confusion.
I like cosplay girls (sue me) and this has been a constant problem with some of these girls. They post a bikini picture or something a bit too sexy, someone (usually attributed to the theoretical "jealous bitch"), and then a moderator somewhere throws it out saying it's pornographic.
I can easily see the same thing happening for "criminal activity," though you would hope that wouldn't survive the escalation process. But how far does the outsourcing go???
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
'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?
Re:That's a wiretap (Score:2, Insightful)
No it's not. Facebook isn't a telecommunications system. There is no legal expectation of privacy.
You will never get the Feds to call the Internet a common carrier like your telephone system. Never in a million years. They're power mad now.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to the free world (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thought Crime (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
Not "should", but "could"... except that doing so was explicitly made illegal, so that's not a fair analogy.
liability (Score:1, Insightful)
Isn't facebook now liable for all the illegal activity (criminal and civil) they don't catch? I though ISPs avoided doing crap like this because it exposed them to liability for all communications. What's changed?
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
jokes (Score:5, Insightful)
Did they consider the liability issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Welcome to the free world (Score:2, Insightful)
This comment tempts me mightily to register and hopefully be able to get mod points - it should be rated 6 - Informative.
Then again, the story itself is reason why I shouldn't register. (No offense, /. - general principles and not anything you've done...)
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's an invalid extrapolation. In the case of the phone, it's you talking to one, or perhaps a few other people in real time. No one who isn't there by invitation of one of the parties can hear the conversation (without a wiretap). In his forum, many people are there who weren't invited by the party making the post, and people can read that post days, weeks, or years later, out of context because it's not the same type of real-time interactive communication as a phone call.
The GP is correct. If it's my forum (e.g. my FB page or my blog), I have final say over what is visible to others. It's my soapbox, if you want to say something I won't allow, go get your own soapbox. Here is how I have expressed this in a post on FB:
I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. However, your right to say it does not guarantee that anyone will listen or hear you. You do not have a right to a soapbox from which to say it, and I will not provide one for you. You have no right to use any soapbox that I control to express your beliefs and opinions.
If I deny you access to my soapbox (e.g. delete your comments), I am not suppressing your right to free speech, I'm exercising mine.
Understand the difference? If not, I'll be happy to remove or block you and save us both any irritation.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:2, Insightful)
In facebook chat, no one is there except for person A who invited person B to a facebook chat.
This article is not about your forum. It is about facebook chat. You were the one who introduced an invalid extrapolation.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:3, Insightful)
Actual censorship would be noticeable pretty quickly but you may never know when you are being spied on. If I regarded it essential for the contents of my communication to remain private I would speak face to face or if that wasn't possible use encryption. There are things I've said over email or phone that I'd like to remain private, but the worst I'd suffer if it doesn't is embarrassment.
If you have something to hide, it makes more sense to hide it that trust other people not to look.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Insightful)
In most civilized countries, a company can in fact not do "whatever they want" with your data even if you give it to them.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the ability to read posts and chats are required simply from a support perspective. How can any of their guys troubleshoot problems without seeing customer data?
Perhaps the issue is if they are held to some kind of confidentiality agreement lick Doctors and Lawyers.
Interesting.
But they are not. Barring federally-regulated information (HIPAA or SOX for example), I don't know whether FB (or Internet information/communication service providers in general) that provide their services for free should be held to the same type of legal standards. Maybe yes, maybe not. It is not something that people can go and say "ZOMG YES" simply because of their personal privacy as they exercise their own information sharing actions.
One thing for sure is that only fools get up angrily in arms because FB doesn't act like a phone carrier or a hospital with the information people put on their own free will after signing FB TOS.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless of course if the ToS contradict current laws, then the ToS are ToSsed out.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:3, Insightful)
This will backfire long-term. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:1, Insightful)
"Google can and does."
But they say it's fully automatic and anonymous.
It's only used to show you '13 year old girl molestation' tools advertisements.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:2, Insightful)
>as much as men who molest 13 year old girls should be castrated and hung
Now that you've signalled that you're the caring type that hangs people, can you clarify what you mean. Does men mean "male adult" which can mean "is able to reproduce" such as a 15 year old male, or maybe we should hang 18 yr olds onward? When I was 18 I had a mature 13 year old girl who pressured me to sleep with her - and her mother sad she was ok if I was with her daughter as she considered me a nice guy. I didn't pursue it because I preferred (and still prefer) older women - but would you condemn me to death if I did?
I understand your galant sentiment, but it reflects a "linch mob" mentality in society that sickens me. When I was 12, I would have given my left nut to have had sex with a 25 year old woman (I was never so lucky). If I had been so lucky, would you and the "linch mob" have condemned her to death too?
Facebook is in the business of mining data (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
No, it is YOU that don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:2, Insightful)
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?.
Domestic and corporate spying has been going on for awhile, look up:
"AT&T installs fiber optic spliiter for NSA"
"Microsoft discloses govt backdoor"
"Corporate spy xe"
Now you expect a publicly traded company, especially Facebook, to defend your rights to privacy? Get real. Keep posting your entire life's details with pictures, videos, & gps tracking history, online. After all, you're not a criminal (in your eyes), nor extremely wealthy, therefore have nothing to fear.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:2, Insightful)
So what else are they spying on! (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thought Crime (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Insightful)
So now you want to raise the age of consent to 25?
Also, just because teenagers decision making process is different than that of a full grown adult doesn't necessarily mean it's worse, even if a grown adult would consider it worse by our criteria. What matters is whether they are happy with their decisions.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the FBI [fbi.gov] 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.