
Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity - adventureful
http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/facebook-scanning-chats/
======
rationalbeats
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 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
I 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.

~~~
Jach
> EVERY single thing you type online is viewed by the NSAs terrorbots.

Evidence? Did you program these NSA bots or something?

> Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves.

No, they just don't know any better.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> If you want your messages
to be heard by limited parties, make it so. "My friends are too stupid to know
how to use any form of encryption" is not an excuse, and might cause you to
pause and consider whether you want to share anything important with such
friends in the first place.

~~~
falcolas
I would say this is close enough to warrant the hyperbolie.

<https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel>

Encryption is great, as long as the people you don't want to hear it can't
decrypt it. Given the NSA's recent moves to build up computing power, and the
way Moore's law works, your encrypted communications today are fodder for
review tomorrow.

~~~
Jach
Oh, certainly the NSA is monitoring a lot and trying to monitor more, but my
pedantic side had to call out the "EVERY single thing". :) Thanks for the link
though, I had forgotten the details of that case and only vaguely remember
hearing about the Obama administration's move to dismiss it. (Which is funny,
because presently a common criticism is that Obama keeps blaming his
predecessor for everything wrong. He doesn't seem very keen on prosecution...)

It's easy to future-proof your encryption, even in the face of exponential
increases in computing power. The biggest danger to encryption systems that
rely on integer factoring (i.e. RSA) right now is feasible quantum computing,
but there are schemes that don't rely on factoring so there's hope on that
front. For the trivial stuff I bother encrypting, I'm more worried about, in
increasing order, being given the choice of decrypting something or getting
shot or sent to prison for life (fortunately we have some precedent in the US
and elsewhere against this), being tortured for a while without knowing why
before being asked to decrypt something, and being tortured without having any
information but being unable to convince the torturer of that.

------
DanielBMarkham
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 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.

~~~
samstave
Wrote 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.

~~~
kunj2aan
What is this?

~~~
samstave
It is a fictional take on where I think Facebook is going, a cyberpunk short
story.

~~~
Terretta
Flesh it out, take on Richard Morgan. :)

~~~
denom
Yes, this manifesto is worth echoing.

------
sriramk
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 <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.

~~~
nbarlow
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.

~~~
pilif
You 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
Maybe 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
OP 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.

~~~
jiggy2011
The only way to achieve this would be to have no law enforcement.

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

~~~
cwe
Do you consider SMS private communications? Your cellphone carrier is just as
likely to eavesdrop on your SMS history as FB does your chats.

~~~
sp332
I 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
There is nothing preventing your SMSs being saved in a telco DB. I'm fairly
certain they are.

~~~
sp332
Well sure it might be, but it doesn't have to. FB messages always get saved,
no question.

~~~
adventureful
FB chat messages don't have to be saved either.

~~~
sp332
If I log in and click the Messages button I can see all my messages. To do
that they have to be on their server. There isn't an off-the-record button I
missed is there?

~~~
Jach
Ideally Facebook would use public-key encryption for chats and allow each user
to individually save the history with their own passphrase they input
encrypting it client-side.

But hey, auto-saving history without prompting you is worth it, right? (Also
figuring out what to advertise to a user.)

~~~
sp332
It seems like you're describing something completely different from FB chat.
anyway you could just encrypt the text, base64-encode it, and paste it into
the chat box. still more convenient than email.

~~~
Jach
FB chat to me is basically real-time private messages rather than more
traditional instant messaging, but everything I described except securely
archiving the history could be done by FB transparently to the user. Of course
you can do the work yourself, I just think it would be a nice gesture if FB
provided the option to do the work for you, a way for the user to conveniently
make sure FB keeps their parsers off the user's chat data. (It could also be
extended to other data.) Also with how frequently Amazon prompts me for my
password, I don't think users would be incredibly turned off by FB prompting
for a password when they start chatting, and their browsers can be made to
remember it anyway.

------
malandrew
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.

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.

~~~
olliesaunders
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.

~~~
einhverfr
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."

~~~
maxerickson
That sounds more like a good way to show you are doing a bang up job of
incarceration.

Berating the legislature to eliminate as many unenforceable laws as possible
seems like a better way to make law enforcement look more effective.

~~~
einhverfr
Have you ever noticed that at most companies, people compete for the best
metrics, not the job most well done? Same thing here, I think.

------
chrsstrm
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?

~~~
iamdave
Possibly 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
But 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
Yes, 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
The Mashable article seems to be sources from a Reuters article.
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-
pr...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-predators-
idUSBRE86B05G20120712) 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
the 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
When everyone's a sexual predator, no one is.

~~~
joering2
When everyone's sexual predator, EXCEPT the elite that decided on who's sexual
predator, then everyone EXCEPT elite goes to jail.

~~~
Jach
Some 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...](http://sheriff.org/faqs/displayfaq.cfm?id=54934ef5-c69b-4771-9035-cd5d75b5554d)

[2]
[http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_ratio_for_slaves_to_s...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_ratio_for_slaves_to_slave_owners_in1831)

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

~~~
delano
Also single view message services, like:
<https://www.thismessagewillselfdestruct.com/> <https://onetimesecret.com/>
<https://pwpush.com/> <https://whisperpassword.com/>

~~~
dinkumthinkum
The problem with all of these services is you have to trust them as well. The
most secure message is the one not sent.

~~~
delano
True, but if you want to communicate you need to trust something at some
point.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Right but why trust them anymore than the others.

------
olliesaunders
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.

~~~
jamesbritt
[http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-
servic...](http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-
can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever.html)

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230477280457555...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html)

<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline>

<http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/facebook-privacy/>

[http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-
media/14...](http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-
media/147638/with-frictionless-sharing-facebook-and-news-orgs-push-boundaries-
of-reader-privacy/)

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian-
gro...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian-group-files-
complaint-over-facebook-privacy.ars)

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_intrusive_than_previously_thought.html)

<http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/>

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php)

[http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-
story/428150/what-f...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-
story/428150/what-facebook-knows/)

------
icambron
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 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
> "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.

------
freemonoid
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.

~~~
nbm
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.

~~~
freemonoid
He was a recruiter from the Facebook MPK office (headquarters)

~~~
nbm
What 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
This 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.

------
lignuist
Someone should monitor Facebook for criminal activity.

~~~
christoph
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

~~~
dredmorbius
That'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.

------
crazygringo
I 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.

------
fl3tch
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".

~~~
Zenst
Indeed 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 :|.

------
danso
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.

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
Yep. 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.)

------
Zenst
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.

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.

~~~
Zenst
I rest my case.

~~~
noarchy
You might have lost some people when you said, "Monitoring is all fine..."

~~~
Zenst
Maybe though given another post I had my doubts.

Thank you I appreciete the feedback. +1 to you for that

------
Zenst
FB 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
I wish it was that easy. I took an online computer course last year, and the
instructor setup a Facebook page to share important information.

------
ck2
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.

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

------
melvinmt
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.

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

~~~
samstave
They do.

~~~
Kerrick
Source?

------
Zenst
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.

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.

------
sageikosa
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.

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.

------
katbyte
Is there any way to easily and securely encrypt Facebook chats? a quick google
finds:

<http://abine.com/facebook.php>

------
benthumb
In 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
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.

------
MRonney
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.

------
Kiro
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).

------
neo1001
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

~~~
rosser
You 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?

