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Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

mashable.com

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Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#91

Post by biomechanica »

chefsurfing wrote: post #58
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #44

It's been clear in my mind for some time now that Facebook is desperately doing anything possible to stay plugged into our internet lives. Their attempted take-over of email, which will probably lead to some success, only reinforces this. I think they see the writing on the wall -- that newer services will take over older ones -- and are doing anything they can to stay top dog. What we need is an abstraction layer on…

I am curious what you think of Eben Moglen's "Freedom Box" project? http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgu8NUm5Zxk

I really, really hope it takes off.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#92

Post by einhverfr »

olliesaunders wrote: post #61
malandrew wrote: post #40

I'm of the opinion that once enough people get fed up with a surveillance state, or even a surveillance society since private entities are involved, that the best way to "fix" the problem is by collectively generating noise that makes it too expensive and time consuming to find a needle in a haystack. Right now they probably generate very few false positives, however if many people went out of their way to actively g…

If this privacy-invading-data-miners are using computers and mathematics they’ll surely find better and better ways of filtering the false positives. But before it even comes to that they’ll probably just scare people into submission by making examples of people who create false positives--probably by treating them as true positives.

there's a problem regarding false positives though. A portion of those may be guilty of other things.

There was this interesting article on this idea of terahertz lasers in airports. I think these machines are great because they are programmable and specific. You can program them to look just for explosives and this reduces the search issues significantly. But what of the fact that they would mean the TSA might be Constitutionally barred from looking for drugs? Would this retard adoption?

I think if you want to show you are doing a great job at law enforcement and minimize the warrant requirement, you want to have as many false positives as the courts will let you get away with. "Yeah they only found a few oz of pot, but they had probable cause to believe he was a sexual predator, so the evidence is admissible."

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#93

Post by einhverfr »

rationalbeats wrote: post #12

I'm not a criminal, I am a a pretty mundane guy actually, but of course we live in a society that every single one of us breaks some small law every day. Which is why I stopped using Facebook. I also stopped using Twitter to tweet. I still use it to follow news sources, I just don't actively tweet. I did that after the NYPD won a court case to see all the private messages you send on Twitter. I also don't comment muc…

Not only small laws, in the eyes of the feds. I highly recommend reading Harvey Silverglate's (veteran of the EFF, ACLU and the FIRE) book "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent." He discusses the issues of vagueness in federal felony statutes.

Think about it this way, the efforts to convict Jeff Skilling (yes, of Enron) of "Honest Services Fraud" would make reading HN from work a federal felony. Note that after the book was published, the Supreme Court threw out Skilling's conviction for honest services fraud on the basis of vagueness. But many other issues remain.

For example, I design my billing cycles on the principle of minimizing invoices of greater than $10k. Is this a federal felony? By some interpretations, it might be. Part of the reason is I don't want lots of my payments from customers being reported to the federal government. Part of the reason is that larger numbers of smaller invoices make cash flow a little easier to manage. Part of it is that I have found that banks don't like seeing a lot of large transactions and therefore my life is easier vis a vis the banks if I keep those to a minimum. But I think such statutes will have to be read narrowly.

>I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.

The internet is for marketing yourself, not expressing yourself.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#94

Post by nbarlow »

sriramk wrote: post #2

This actually tripped up a friend of mine a couple of years ago. She left a comment on a photo of someone holding a toy gun saying "You look like " followed by a smiley. Within hours, she got a message and a phone call from someone claiming to be working for FB's security who asked her some basic questions on why she left that comment. The whole experience scared her from using FB for a long time. I thought the whole…

It sounds like your friend got trolled. We don't call users whom we suspect are criminals, and we certainly wouldn't call someone we suspect of being a terrorist. Especially on the grounds of a terrorism joke - believe it or not, we do have a sense of humor.

I work for Facebook's User Operations team and, as the Reuters article says, this specific tool targets the (thankfully) rare cases of adults trying to use the site for the purpose of grooming kids.

We use advanced technical systems to specifically identify grooming situations and strive for a low false positive rate. We have strong internal controls around these tools to prevent misuse or abuse, and stringent guidelines for the way we cooperate with law enforcement.

For whatever it's worth, I have been at Facebook for several years, and I am so amazed every time we're able to help a child avert an absolute worst-case scenario. These cases are rare, but they do happen, and I'm grateful we have the tools necessary to keep the worst of the worst from unfolding in the real world.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#95

Post by greenyoda »

icambron wrote: post #62

It seems like the correct approach is for Facebook to do only what's legally required of it, and nothing more. That would allow society to have a transparent debate about what, exactly, should be required, leaving FB policy out of it. As I understand it, FB is currently only required to respond to appropriately specific subpoenas and warrants. If the cops want more, they should petition for laws to require that and w…

> "And why does FB even want this responsibility?"

Maybe Facebook wants to cultivate the appearance of being a "safe place", as a precursor to opening its services to younger users? That would certainly be a way of growing their user base.

I agree that whatever the reason they're doing this is, it's misguided and creepy.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#97

Post by einhverfr »

marshray wrote: post #9
stfu wrote: post #3

What I find interesting is, that now the but think of the innocent children argument is also getting adapted by the corporate world to justify incredible privacy invasions. Facebook's mass wiretapping and analysis of its users private communication seems almost like the post office scanning each and ever letter and postcard in the vague hope of finding some keywords related to bomb, terror and of cause "children". I…

This is a sincere question: Why would you think Facebook chat would be "private communication"?

It would be covered under the Stored Communications Act. Unfortunately reading the act it looks like it is up for debate as to whether they are breaking the law. The Stored Communications Act allows voluntary disclosure when two things are true:

1) The communications were inadvertently obtained and 2) The communication appears to pertain to commission of a crime.

I don't think you can classify this as inadvertent. So I wonder if Facebook can be sued.

There is one way to find out. Create a decoy post, hear from law enforcement, and sue Facebook.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#98

Post by [deleted] »

ck2 wrote: post #50

Somewhat related, apparently if you want to shutdown someone's paypal account and suspend their funds (and yours as well, be warned) just send them some money with the reason "drug money". Apparently people have sent their friends money, rent, etc. and did that as a joke, boom, it's a nightmare.

[deleted]

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#100

Post by nbm »

freemonoid wrote: post #96

I was once informed by an FB employee that federal agents are ensconced at the FB premises to monitor users' communications and shut down / censor FB groups and venues for "hate" speech and terroristic threats.

What position did this Facebook employee hold at the company? In which office did they work? Is it possible they weren't really a Facebook employee? What sort of censorship are you talking about?

I ask because I've never heard anything like that, despite working with the teams that build tools to fight spam, scams, fake accounts, and to assist the User Operations team to handle reports from people who encounter harassment, bullying, and other anti-social or criminal activity.

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