Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

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.<p>Which is why I stopped using Facebook.<p>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.<p>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)<p>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)<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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 &#60;insert-name-of-well-known-terrorist&#62;" 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.<p>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?<p>Would love it if someone from FB here on HN could comment.

What I find interesting is, that now the <i>but think of the innocent children</i> argument is also getting adapted by the corporate world to justify incredible privacy invasions.<p>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.

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 generate false positives on a regular basis, you've effectively disabled such a system and manufactured reasonable doubt.<p>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.<p>IMHO automated cooperative manufactured reasonable doubt will probably be one of the last bastions of civil liberties in a surveillance society.

So 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?

The Mashable article seems to be sources from a Reuters article. <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-predators-idUSBRE86B05G20120712" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-pr...</a> The program does appear to focus on sexual predators.<p>Mashable quotes Facebook as stating “where appropriate and to the extent required by law to ensure the safety of the people who use Facebook"<p>Can anyone speak to whether or not proactive scanning could possible be required by law? It seems entirely unlikely, but IANAL.

All the more reason to use encryption technology like Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging (<a href="http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr" rel="nofollow">http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr</a>)! I've been working on an OTR-compatible iOS app called ChatSecure (<a href="https://chatsecure.org" rel="nofollow">https://chatsecure.org</a>) that is capable of encrypting your Facebook chats (or any other XMPP service).

Does 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.

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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>want</i> this responsibility? Isn't the simplest, most obvious model to say no by default?

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.

Someone should monitor Facebook for criminal activity.

I find this fascinating from a legal/political perspective.<p>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.)<p>The fact is that Facebook has taken upon itself a role similar to that of the police, but without any democratic oversight.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.

This 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".

Never 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.<p>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.

What 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.<p>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.

FB has a terrible reputation with regards to privacy without real justification.<p>This is not supprising in any way.<p>If you don't like this then don't do FaceBook - realy that easy I have found.

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".<p>Apparently people have sent their friends money, rent, etc. and did that as a joke, boom, it's a nightmare.

This news made me lose my interest in FB more. They continually go beyond user's privacy.

Now 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.

What if Google did this with its properties (search, gmail, gtalk, etc)?

Whilst 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.<p>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.

Decades 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.<p>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.<p>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.

Is there any way to easily and securely encrypt Facebook chats? a quick google finds:<p><a href="http://abine.com/facebook.php" rel="nofollow">http://abine.com/facebook.php</a>

In the post-9/11 era this is <i>de rigueur</i> 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.

So, "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.

Tailor 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.

How 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).

I 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