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Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity
- ck2 14y agoSomewhat 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 14y ago[deleted]
- sriramk 14y agoThis 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 <insert-name-of-well-known-terrorist>" 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 thing was adhoc and confusing. Anyone who saw the comment could easily see that it was a joke. Also, if it wasn't a joke, why is FB calling her and not someone from law enforcement? Would love it if someone from FB here on HN could comment.
- qq66 14y agoIt could also be a "friend" who saw the status update and had a sick sense of humor...
- rationalbeats 14y agoHow could the friend even find a way of contacting someone at facebook. That is near impossible.
- gojomo 14y agoThere's almost always been some form of 'flag'/'report as inappropriate' button.
- slig 14y agoI think he meant the friend called her pretending to be from FB, as a in phone prank.
- sriramk 14y agoNope, her account got temporarily disabled within a short time of her posting that comment, got unlocked after a day or two (I'm not sure how long it took to become available). Sure, some friend could theoretically have found a way to get into her account, done the locking and unlocking but seems pretty far fetched.
- personlurking 14y agoReminds me of Apple sec. pretending to be police in order to track the missing iPhone.
- antidoh 14y agoNever forget.
- einhverfr 14y agowe should have a day of protest doing exactly this to eachother......
- nbarlow 14y agoIt 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.
- pilif 14y agoYou shouldn't be striving for a low false positive rate, but for a zero false positive rate. "Think of the children" doesn't rationalize even one wrongly accused person - especially in today's society where an accusation is enough to completely ruin ones life.
- taligent 14y agoMaybe they live in the real world where a zero false positive rate simply doesn't exist. And be serious. Getting asked a question from Facebook is hardly going to ruin someone's life is it now ?
- pilif 14y agoOP said they aren't calling users but passing information on to law enforcement. Getting a call by Facebook for a bad joke is one thing. Getting the door busted in by police and subsequently shamed and fired from your job because of a bad joke you thought you made in private is another. in case of law enforcement, the only acceptable false positive rate is zero.
- flyinRyan 14y agoWhy didn't your friend just hang up on them? If someone is that stupid, don't give them the time of day. Though, I might ping my lawyer after laughing at them and hanging up just so someone knows if I suddenly disappear.
- stfu 14y agoWhat 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 wonder how long it is going to take until Google is going to send automated notifications to my local police station when I'm going to start googeling some water bomb tutorials for the summer.
- marshray 14y agoThis is a sincere question: Why would you think Facebook chat would be "private communication"?
- cwe 14y agoDo you consider SMS private communications? Your cellphone carrier is just as likely to eavesdrop on your SMS history as FB does your chats.
- personlurking 14y agoThere's an illusion in online communication that makes the average user think any particular message they send is like physically handing a message to another person. Using Gmail as an example, sure, your email goes to the right person, but you first send it to/through Gmail. They just happen to pass it along to the recipient.
- sp332 14y agoI consider FB chats to be much less private because they actually get stored on a server somewhere by default. Also I can access them anywhere with an internet account. Neither of these things are true of SMS.
- mahyarm 14y agoThere is nothing preventing your SMSs being saved in a telco DB. I'm fairly certain they are.
- Zenst 14y agoWhat if Facebook make a mistake, do they get done for wasting police time? Monitoring is all fine but it needs to be done independantly, anything else is a conflict of interest and something that FaceBook staff can abuse. You know it would not supprise me one bit if FaceBook had staff monitoring this modding down every post that holds them in true^H^H^H^HBAD light.
- chrsstrm 14y agoSo what happens if Facebook's system flags a message, it is reviewed by their staff and then dismissed as non-actionable, but turns out to be the precursor to a severe criminal act? Does the blame come back on Facebook for failing to prevent this crime?
- iamdave 14y agoPossibly failure to properly notify will result in some sort of legislative slap on the wrist, but not for failing to prevent it. That isn't their responsibility.
- chrsstrm 14y agoBut didn't they make it their responsibility the minute they began screening messages with the intent of reporting crimes? Selective enforcement whether by choice or mistake isn't an option they can choose here. And criminal legalities aside, I would be more concerned about the civil litigation from the victim or victim's family. Facebook pledged to prevent crime against its users, witnessed evidence that a crime would take place, and then failed to act. Tell me no one would go after Facebook's deep pockets in this situation given they could have reasonably prevented whatever crime took place, even if it meant reporting it to the proper authorities. It may just be professional paranoia talking, but I can't see how this doesn't release them from some sort of liability in a worst-case scenario.
- flyinRyan 14y agoYes, and since they claim that nearly 1 out of every 7 people on the planet (900 million users!) are on facebook, I'd take the default position that if any crimes happen they probably failed to report it. :)
- zethraeus 14y agoThe Mashable article seems to be sources from a Reuters article. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-predators-idUSBRE86B05G20120712 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-pr... The program does appear to focus on sexual predators. Mashable quotes Facebook as stating “where appropriate and to the extent required by law to ensure the safety of the people who use Facebook" Can anyone speak to whether or not proactive scanning could possible be required by law? It seems entirely unlikely, but IANAL.
- joering2 14y agothe problem lays within who decide who is a "sexual predator", who is not. I can assure you if this is left without governance, it will be very easy to slip in you and me and label as as predators as well. For example, you hold a hand of your 6-year old nephew when walking back from school when picking him up, per your sister request. In Facebook standards, you may already be a "sexual predator". I hope you see where I am going with this...
- Jach 14y agoWhen everyone's a sexual predator, no one is.
- joering2 14y agoWhen everyone's sexual predator, EXCEPT the elite that decided on who's sexual predator, then everyone EXCEPT elite goes to jail.
- Jach 14y agoSome sex offenders have avoided jail time. Florida has an interesting comparison of the terms[1]. How large is the pool of "elite" you're talking about? I don't think a size of over 10,000 deserves the term (so about 0.0033... percent of the US population if we limit to there) and I'd lean more toward a max of 500 (0.000166...%). It's at least a fun thought-experiment: how low can you go before the economy collapses and/or those in charge can't keep the prisoners or slaves in line or fed? Even back in the days of US slavery, only two states had slightly more slaves than non-slaves[2]. [1] http://sheriff.org/faqs/displayfaq.cfm?id=54934ef5-c69b-4771-9035-cd5d75b5554d http://sheriff.org/faqs/displayfaq.cfm?id=54934ef5-c69b-4771... [2] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_ratio_for_slaves_to_slave_owners_in1831 http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_ratio_for_slaves_to_s...
- fl3tch 14y agoThis looks like it's mostly targeted at sex predators, but I wonder if the system is also activated if you jokingly tell a friend that they are "smoking crack".
- Zenst 14y agoIndeed it does and is another case of "think of the children" without thinking of the adults. Conversations of "what was that shit resturant you went to the other day" would probably get flagged as well once they replied with an address. Or indeed local phrased like "I'm hittting the bank first then we can meet up at the bar on 42nd street" were the term hitting is slang for nothing more than a harmless turn of phrase saying i'm going to the bank. Nothing sinister, though could easily be misinterpreted. There are many others and also people have nicknames. Still on the plus side, it will create alot of jobs were you get to read other people so called private conversations :|.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Jach 14y agoWhy bother with this system when there are plenty of public (not that it matters for FB) profiles admitting the owner is using some sort of illegal drug?
- Zenst 14y agoWhilst FB have legal obligations in many countries I must say when I read "phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language" then the first thing that sprang to mind was nothing to do with crime. People swear, people exchange details. SO I guess alot gets flagged up to there staff. Question is, do they warn you that your private conversation is not private and do they comply with the data protection acts the various countries have and more importantly who monitors FB? So many things can be taken out of context and acted upon in good faith at the detrement of innocent parties, this is concerning. But I don't do FB, nor do I have any immediate plans either. That has nothing to do with this, but more todo with concerns in general about there privacy and policeys they act out.
- rationalbeats 14y agoI'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 much at all on blogs, and social sites like this one or Reddit anymore. (I use to be a top 10 contributor over at Reddit. At least that is what some metric said a few years ago when someone listed the top ten most popular usernames. That account is deleted now) I am slowly pulling out. I have a deep distrust of the current surveillance state in the United States. I remember reading a story about a guy who posted a quote from fight club on his Facebook status and a few hours later in the middle of the night the NYPD was busting in his door and he spent 3 years in legal limbo over it. (Might have been NJ police anyways, red flags) You start piecing together these things, and you start to realize that your thoughts and ruminations about life, the universe, and the mundane, can be used against you at any moment and can completely strip you of your liberty and freedom, and any happiness you may have had. 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.
- samstave 14y agoI have never had a facebook account. Never have - never will. I distrust everything they do. And while we like to think that other sites are not as bad, I was recently censored on Quora for asking about why a post was censored on Reddit. They threw some "against policy" bullshit at me, and Marc Bodnick attempted to appear sympathetic and that his hands were tied and he didnt like the policy either - but it was a BS response. They removed my question asking why the top LIBOR story on reddit was removed - I asked if Yishan Wong was directly responsible for such censorship etc... After berating Marc for the BS excuse they stopped replying to me. EVERY single thing you type online is viewed by the NSAs terrorbots. Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves.
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- chrisballinger 14y agoAll the more reason to use encryption technology like Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging (http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr)! I've been working on an OTR-compatible iOS app called ChatSecure (https://chatsecure.org https://chatsecure.org) that is capable of encrypting your Facebook chats (or any other XMPP service).
- delano 14y agoAlso single view message services, like: https://www.thismessagewillselfdestruct.com/ https://www.thismessagewillselfdestruct.com/ https://onetimesecret.com/ https://onetimesecret.com/ https://pwpush.com/ https://pwpush.com/ https://whisperpassword.com/ https://whisperpassword.com/
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoThe problem with all of these services is you have to trust them as well. The most secure message is the one not sent.
- delano 14y agoTrue, but if you want to communicate you need to trust something at some point.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoRight but why trust them anymore than the others.
- neo1001 14y agoI once made a joke on fb on a friend and posted "you smoke doobies" and he was so shit scared that he took it down. Lol
- rosser 14y agoYou do realize that could very well be more about his Mom being is among his FB friends, than out of any fear of Zuckerberg and crew calling the cops on them for what would amount to misdemeanor possession, at worst, yes?
- lignuist 14y agoSomeone should monitor Facebook for criminal activity.
- christoph 14y agoQuis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- dredmorbius 14y agoThat's what checks and balances are all about. In a fair system, there's no one custodian. It's not perfect, but it's reasonably workable. There are some prerequisites, however.
- Zenst 14y agoFB has a terrible reputation with regards to privacy without real justification. This is not supprising in any way. If you don't like this then don't do FaceBook - realy that easy I have found.
- re_todd 14y agoI wish it was that easy. I took an online computer course last year, and the instructor setup a Facebook page to share important information.
- katbyte 14y agoIs there any way to easily and securely encrypt Facebook chats? a quick google finds: http://abine.com/facebook.php http://abine.com/facebook.php
- malandrew 14y agoI'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 generate false positives on a regular basis, you've effectively disabled such a system and manufactured reasonable doubt. Generating deliberate false-positive inducing noise in communications deemed to be private between two or more individuals who know one another should be protected as free speech. To argue otherwise would be the equivalent of prosecuting an individual for yelling "Fire" in their own home among friends and stating that such an act is a clear and present danger to the US. IMHO automated cooperative manufactured reasonable doubt will probably be one of the last bastions of civil liberties in a surveillance society.
- eschulte 14y agoMight be time to hook up something like Emacs' "M-x spook" to FB.
- olliesaunders 14y agoIf 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.
- einhverfr 14y agothere'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."
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoIt'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 top of social networks. No matter what their TOS, they do not own my friends or my conversations with my friends. I have no qualms at all about having some other service handle my friendships and conversations in a way I deem appropriate. We need to pry Facebook's greasy hands from our throats before it's too late. At one point they were cute. Then they were pleasantly time-wasting. Now they're crossing over the line firmly into evil territory.
- chefsurfing 14y agoI am curious what you think of Eben Moglen's "Freedom Box" project? http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgu8NUm5Zxk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgu8NUm5Zxk
- biomechanica 14y agoI really, really hope it takes off.
- biomechanica 14y agoI guess I have to send a reply to my past self: I don't think hope is enough, actually. The Freedom Box needs volunteers desperately. Everything from code to user interface to ideas. So I suppose my hope is: I really, really hope more people get involved. After all, it is we the people who ultimately are creating the thing.
- samstave 14y agoWrote this some time ago: --- It started innocently enough. Everyone is on it. Everyone. In the more than 20 years since it was founded - and now - daily life just could not be managed without it. Sure, it started innocently enough. Connect with your friends, post your pics, keep up with the fam. Yeah, that was then. It wasn't too long before they started adding features. Adding value they called it. Extending your circle. Enabling you they'd say. Yeah, in the same way a spiders web is beautiful. The pattern and symmetry, glistening like shiny gossamer art. Its beauty pulls you in - you don't realize at first as you touch it, that it sticks. No, more than sticks - you become imbued with it. The more you move it wraps around you, encasing you... entombing you. For the data-mining black widow to come and suck the marketable value right out of you, your connections... every aspect of your life is now a product. Classified, organized, tagged, sorted, tracked, pegged, followed, poked, monetized, labeled... owned is what you are. A commodity. A small spec among 3.5 billion in the user base of the book. That's what it was these days... just simply 'the book'. Everyone knows - everyone is aware. They are all in the book. Not even a page, or a word either... more like a letter. A single letter. An iconographic digital hologram of the total sum of your parts - all wrapped up real nice in a uniform singular profitable little package called your user profile. Displayed and viewed and consumed and tracked billions of times over. With more than thirty trillion page views per month, the cancerous blue and white digital encapsulation of the human soul was now blazoned across innumerable screens as nearly half the worlds population interacted on the book - more than 20% of the worlds population on the book at any given moment. A study, one of the countless to be sure, said that now more than 90% of real human interactions occurred through the book. What does that even mean anymore... real? Real human interactions? Through the book? how is that even possible. It was no wonder that in the last few years the backlash has switched to resisting this unexpected strangle-hold on the human condition. Most never saw it coming... happily going along with every new feature update, privacy change, "enhancement". MZ was repeating himself a lot these days... except his frame of reference had gotten bigger... along with his security detail.... Where years ago, the book was likened to that which only came along to change humans interactions every 100 years... now his statements were 10 fold. MZ thinks of himself as the embodiment of the singularity... whatever that means. Some fucking fantasy of a long dead cybervisionary that couldn't recognize the makings of our current prison I'm sure. Fuck him. Looking around looks a lot more like binary slavery than any form of singularity. None of our old problems have been solved - in fact the book has only made things worse. After it became a "platform for governance and outreach" we, people like - those who really see, knew. We knew what this meant. Game fucking over. This era of hyper connectivity and ultra social awareness was supposed to usher in some sort of Utopian orgasm -- one in which MZ would be carried on the shoulders of the masses to stand next to fantastical human saviors like Jesus. Fictional allusions to stellar bodies be damned! The only problem is that most of the world is too busy. Feeding their attention into the black hole of the book to notice... or care I guess. With ubiquitous access thanks to the assimilation of the largest global fiber network a few years ago, the book was now able to offer complete and total "free" access via the acquired goog-net. Years ago, when Athena rolled out - it was a huge success. Welcomed into every neighborhood - direct, very high speed fiber access in every home was quickly made into a "right". The model was seen as our manifest destiny, held in a 62-micron translucent hair that fed us with more 1' and 0's to each person in a single day than the entire digital output of the globe in 1999. Such an umbilical cannot be bad right! The only problem is we misjudged the direction of the flow! Now, with goog-net reaching everywhere, but the book being the only lens into the tubes -- our minds are warped. We are a most technically advanced - yet wholly dependent child-like civilization. A mutant. If its not on the platform. Not "in the book" they say -- how can it be trusted - how could it succeed? How can you expect to be relevant? HOW CAN IT NOT BE RELEVANT! Slaves! All of them! This is why we act! This is what is needed. Who are we? Who the fuck were we? Not this! Surely not this. It is time.... We take action now. Rewrite this so called book.
- olliesaunders 14y agoDoes anyone know a site where all of the scary things (civil rights and privacy violations) that are going on have been aggregated? I sometimes get people asking why I’m not on Facebook. It would be nice to have a place to point people to about why because it’s quite difficult to explain normally.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoJust Google "Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie," and you will be good. But watch out cuz they're watching you. :)
- Futurebot 14y agoHere's a good place to start: https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy The issues list in the sidebar digs into each topic a little bit more deeply (cell tracking, biometrics, etc.)
- jamesbritt 14y agohttp://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever.html http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-servic... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230477280457555... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/facebook-privacy/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/facebook-privacy/ http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/147638/with-frictionless-sharing-facebook-and-news-orgs-push-boundaries-of-reader-privacy/ http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/14... http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian-group-files-complaint-over-facebook-privacy.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian-gro... http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_intrusive_than_previously_thought.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_... http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa... http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-facebook-knows/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-f...
- melvinmt 14y agoNow I'm pretty sure that my account was (temporarily) disabled for this reason when I posted a politically biased link about the refused Iranians at Apple stores.
- icambron 14y agoIt 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 we can all argue about it like responsible citizens. And we could equally demand more protection. But this thing where sometimes FB voluntarily sends law enforcement bits of information and sometimes they don't based on poorly defined criteria is just creepy. And why does FB even want this responsibility? Isn't the simplest, most obvious model to say no by default?
- greenyoda 14y ago> "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.
- flyinRyan 14y agoEven better would be for them to set up the system in such a way that they couldn't provide this information if they wanted to. They should go as far as moving the actual data to servers that respect human rights and privacy better than the US government does.
- five_star 14y agoThis news made me lose my interest in FB more. They continually go beyond user's privacy.
- naner 14y agoWhat if Google did this with its properties (search, gmail, gtalk, etc)?
- danso 14y agoNever assume anything you send online is private. If the service isn't monitoring you, your friends are. And if not your friends, then the people who share your friends' computers, or anyone who comes into possssion of it, have he potential to expose your communications. And while this has always been the case ever since letter writing, electronic communication is so much easier to parse and distribute and copy on bulk.
- idupree 14y agoYep. Google probably knows my address, phone number, email, and name, not because I've told the Internet, but because I told a friend how to drive me home and he entered it in his Android smartphone's address-book. Or was it Apple..then Apple knows (I forget). (well, I did because I participated in GSoC, and they needed my address to pay me, which I decided was worth it for me! Etc. etc.)
- freemonoid 14y agoI 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.
- nbm 14y agoWhat 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.
- freemonoid 14y agoHe was a recruiter from the Facebook MPK office (headquarters)
- nbm 14y agoWhat position was he recruiting for, and roughly when (let's say, which quarter and year)? How likely was he a new recruiter? I'm not sure I can express my skepticism about this enough - our security, safety, and site integrity teams are some of the most privacy-conscious people I know, and even a hint of something like this happening here would lead to very pointed questions asked at the weekly Q&A every week until it was resolved.
- freemonoid 14y agoThis was last year, and the recruiter was an old timer, so to speak; he wasn't new to FB. He was recruiting for the software engineering positions. Really, are you surprised that there are federal agents on the premises, or just upset at the thought that FB users' privacy could be compromised in such a situation? To the degree that FB forum and groups ToS conforms with federal law and moreover seeks to go above and beyond the letter of the law then FB in this regard could be thought of as an extension of the federal government in such matters with regards to its own users. In this light it is no more relevant whether federal agents look at private or group communications, as opposed to bona fide FB employees. It doesn't matter. This is a private company; the first amendment doesn't apply. In any case, FB as a company isn't exactly widely respected for its position on its users' data, nor is it known to play nice with its users' privacy. Let's not forget that of the companies whom the federal government sought to extract users' accounts' data from with regards to the Wikileaks issue 18 months ago, only Twitter publicized the compelled exposure of its users' data. Facebook happily gave the feds all the users' info they sought without telling us about it. Although IIRC you have said that you've worked with the FB spam and fake account / phishing detection team, FB is a large enough organization at this point that the team responsible for complying with federal mandates and managing FB's relation with federal law enforcement is separate. Tao Stein and team have no bearing on this particular matter, nor should they care that real users happen to talk about and discuss real issues that federal agents think should be taken down. This is a separate matter entirely from what you've worked on.
- Kiro 14y agoHow come every time there's a post about Facebook the usually intelligent HN crowd goes nuts? I can understand the concerns but this whole thread is filled with alarmists and looks like something taken from reddit (or even 4chan).
- sageikosa 14y agoDecades ago, a friend of mine (call him Mickey) was under a DEA investigation due to some bone-headed thing he did involving one of his acquaintances (call him Ken) asking him to receive a shipment from Colorado for him. Now the fun part is another friend of ours (call him Jeb) was in the habit of making movie quotes when he started phone calls, so he calls up Mickey and leads in with a Lethal Weapon 2 line about "shipments", completely unknowning that the DEA was potentially tapping the call. Because of the way the warrant was written, Mickey was able to wave off the tap on Jeb's call since it only covered calls from Ken. But it could just as easily led to all sorts of other problems since between friends, the level of discourse can go far afield of what a non-initiated 3rd party might consider normal.
- crazygringo 14y agoI find this fascinating from a legal/political perspective. Facebook is essentially using the same techniques to monitor private communications as the NSA supposedly does. This means Facebook has the power to report, for example, selected messages but not others. (I'm not saying they do, of course, just that they could be selective or discriminatory that way.) The fact is that Facebook has taken upon itself a role similar to that of the police, but without any democratic oversight. This is different from a bar owner overhearing a conversation about a crime and calling the police, because he wasn't specifically monitoring every single word said by every bar patron. But Facebook is casting a wide net by analyzing every conversation that happens. Questions: should Facebook be permitted to do this? Should we ask for laws preventing companies from "eavesdropping" on their users' communications with the intent of detecting and reporting criminal behavior? Should this be the role of the democratically-elected government instead? Should sites be required to turn user communication over to the government for such analysis? It's a fascinating area of law/politics with so much room for future development, and gets down to the heart of what values a society has.
- benthumb 14y agoIn the post-9/11 era this is de rigueur and at some level socially sanctioned in the name of keeping us safe from terrorists and social deviants. And I don't think you can argue credibly against these operations w/o first interrogating the various pretexts that have set the stage for them: Oklahoma City, 9/11, 7/7, 3/11 etc.
- casemorton 14y agoSo, "cooperation with police" now entails creating their own criteria for crime and dragnetting the presumed private conversations of a billion people. I guess I better not confirm birthday parties or holidays with young relatives or friends kids on that site.
- MRonney 14y agoTailor your free speech for who is watching, or else you could get into trouble. Welcome to the new America that our fear of terrorism built.