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:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would Facebook spend money policing it's patrons and voluntarily reporting misdeeds? They are a "for profit" company, not a social service.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Interesting)
the logical fallacy of the slippery slope (Score:3, Interesting)
"gays should be allowed to marry"
"By your logic, necrophiliacs and bestiality practitioners should be allowed to marry"
"marijuana should be legal"
"By your logic, plutonium and ricin should be legal"
"private servers are not subject to free speech rules meant to prohibit the government's intrusive actions because private servers aren't the government"
"By your logic, cell phones should spy on you"
it's called the slippery slope, and when you engage in it, you lose an argument. because depending upon the slippery slope to make your point means you are depending upon human beings not able to tell the difference between very different things. that i, or the law, can't tell the difference between a gay person and a necrophiliac. that i, or the law, can't tell the difference between marijuana and plutonium. that i, or the law, can't tell the difference between a web server chat board and a cell phone. bullshit
therefore, you've lost the argument
it's your right to think it is douchey. it is also the letter of the law and completely in line with the intentions of the founding fathers, because they understood the difference between private property and the government. do you?
Of course the example is the best case scenario (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
HTML5 Facebook Encryption Layer (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Yes, well, not exactly. (Score:2, Interesting)
The slippery slope, as a fallacy, implies that two unrelated things, X and Y can lead from one to the other through a series of intermediary steps. Gay marriage is about consenting adults having the right to make the choice to marry as consenting adults. Therefore it is fallacious to draw a slippery slope comparison to it leading to necrophila as dead people cannot consent. This slippery slope is usually drawn by people who find homosexuality to be against their moral standards and hence they claim that tolerance of one 'immoral' thing is a slippery slope that will lead to other 'immoral' practices being tolerated. From our perspective, this is fallacious, because the argument is about the rights of consenting adults to live together and look after each other as they wish. From their perspective, they see, moral slippage.
A fallacy is only a fallacy when the conclusion is not supported by the premise. A slippery slope does not always have to be fallacious and does not automatically lose the argument--if it can be proven that all the intermediary steps link. In this case, the poster is only responding to the claim that since private companies do not have to respect our privacy rights, they can do anything they want with our data. This is of course incorrect because one form of communication is protected by law and the other one isn't. I'm not even sure if this is a slippery slope argument.
Both forms of communication are frequently owned by private companies, so one can't argue that private companies can do whatever they want. Private companies can only do what they are legally entitled to do. You might say this brings to light the question: if cell phone communications via private companies are protected, why aren't our chats and emails? And since we have privacy settings, or rather the illusion of privacy, it isn't exactly like it is easily made apparent that our private correspondence is anything but private.
It isn't a slippery slope to point out what happens when one's illusion of privacy is invaded. We've seen countless examples of this over the years.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:0, Interesting)
As much as men who molest 13 year girls should be castrated and hung
Pedophobia is as much a mental illness as homophobia and racism.
It is the violence and inhumanity that pedophobes have towards people that they need to be stopped in their tracks. There are people (thank goodness) who (secretly) stalk pedophobes and harass them.
Just like the Arab Spring, sometimes people need to fight back. If you moderators who moderated the abusive comment of the parent up, had any morals, you would kill yourselves.
People who are abused by the Conservative members of society will eventually get what's coming to them, as is shown by the people brave enough to commit school shootings and workplace massacres.
You will reap what you sow. You sick, inhuman bastards.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Interesting)
Dunno how to break it to you, but there are a lot more issues than just sexual congress here.
I take it then that you want to raise the age for driving, alcohol use, joining the military, and everything else typically restricted by age to 25?
Or are we going to do the sensible thing and realize that young people have had adult responsibilities for millenia and dealt with it fine? The problem here isn't the brain of a young adult, they obviously work well enough or we wouldn't all be here. The problem is paranoid parents looking for ever more excuses to exert ever more control over their offspring.
But since you said it: the problem is that teenagers are far more likely than adults to *expect* to be happy with their decisions, and only afterwards find out they're not.
I've not actually seen data that shows that. I've seen data that shows that teenagers think harder (IOW, the decision making part of their brain uses more oxygen) about risky situations, and are more likely to make choices adults wouldn't. Is there data about how satisfied they are with their decisions?
But whether teenagers make better decisions for themselves than the decisions adults make for themselves is irrelevant. What's important is whether teenagers make better decisions for teenagers than adults make for teenagers. I've seen no evidence that this is the case.
Re:Facebook is a public place (Score:4, Interesting)
Do yourself a favor and stop being deliberately fucking obtuse about this.
Provide some arguments not based on anecdote or threats and I will.
I'm like this because my mother, my wife, my wife's sister, my aunt, all have suffered abuse at the hands of older men they were supposed to be able to trust.
That's an awful thing, but what does this have to do with statutory rape?
The psychological damage that comes from rape is undeniable
Except that quite a lot of people have lost their virginity before the age of consent and deny that it has done them any harm. If anything, it's the unnecessary shame that people like you force on them that does the real harm.
If you are confused about this I strongly recommend you don't test your head-up-the-ass moral ambiguity out on the nearest teenage girl you can find,
My sexual needs are sated, thanks. But at 13, I would have loved to been "raped" by a 30 year old. I know there are other 13 year olds out there who would like that opportunity. I still don't see any reason to deny them that.
So, I repeat, do yourself a favor, and shut the fuck up before you really piss me off.
And just what are you going to do about it, a barrel roll?
What about two 14-year-olds? (Score:3, Interesting)
The big problem that Facebook gets into when reporting sexual crimes is where to draw the line. It's a particular problem when you run into the irrational and hysterical laws and prosecutions on sex with young people.
This sounds like the old stories of photo processors who were required to report all photos with "suspicion" of child sex abuse to prosecutors. As you recall, professional photographers were arrested for taking nude pictures of their own children. Parents were arrested for taking bathtub pictures of infants. Parents had their children taken into custody for months. Innocent people had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses to clear themselves. Prosecutors offered the choice of plea bargains or felony charges.
Most of us would be uncomfortable about a 30-year-old man having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but where does it stop? What about a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl (which would be legal in the UK, I believe).
What about a 19-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl? An 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl? I'll leave it to you to visualize the spreadsheets.
What about two 14-year-olds? That's illegal in a lot of states. I bet there are a lot of 14-year-olds arranging sexual activities on Facebook. The last numbers I saw were that 10% of all 14-year-old girls have had intercourse. What are you going to do -- put 10% of the male population in jail?
Here's a more reasonable (medical) definition:
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/psychiatric_disorders/sexuality_and_sexual_disorders/paraphilias.html [merckmanuals.com]
Sexual offenses against children constitute a significant proportion of reported criminal sexual acts. Arbitrarily, the age of a person with pedophilia is set at 16 yr, with the age difference between offender and child victim set at 5 yr. The age of the child is usually 13 yr. For older adolescents with pedophilia (ie, 17 to 18 yr old), no precise age difference is specified; clinical and legal judgment is relied on. Legal criteria may be different from psychiatric criteria.
That's reasonable. I think that if you want to prosecute people for having sex, you have to demonstrate that one party was actually harmed. The prosecution shouldn't do more harm than the behavior.
Many much-reported prosecutions are of people who wouldn't fit into that medical definition. 17-year-old boys get prosecuted for having sex with 16-year-old girls. 16-year-olds get prosecuted for having sex with each other. The laws are draconian. Adolescent boys get 10-year prison terms. Teenagers wind up having to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives, drastically limiting where they can live and work. Often, they're forced to plea bargain and accept lifetime sex offender registration or go to trial and risk years in prison. People lose their jobs and have to quit college. The cost of defending yourself against such a prosecution can be tens of thousands of dollars, enough to cost a family its house and its college savings.
The people who pass these laws and prosecute them say that they'll examine each case using "reasonable judgment," and not prosecute "Romeo and Juliet" situations among teenagers, but that's bullshit. There's always some asshole prosecutor who says, "The law says it's rape. Discussion over." Once you start down the roller-coaster of notification and prosecution, there's no turning back.
Many of the defendants are black -- white people, especially wealthy people, have enough influence with the local prosecutors to get out of these situations.
I don't want Facebook reading my personal messages to find out if I wrote something suspicious that they should report to the police. I realize their situation but this will do a lot of damage to a lot of people. First get rational laws on drugs and sex, and then start prosecuting them.