Facebook is monitoring your chats for illegal activity

Like it? Share it!

Facebook is monitoring your chats for illegal activity

People like to post all kinds of dumb shit on their Facebook wall, but you should probably know that if you’re going to post some really, really dumb and illegal shit to Facebook, like injuring someone, theft, burglary, terrorism etc, Facebook is watching your chats and may report you to the police.

The screening process begins with scanning software that monitors chats for words or phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language.

The software pays more attention to chats between users who don’t already have a well-established connection on the site and whose profile data indicate something may be wrong, such as a wide age gap. The scanning program is also “smart” — it’s taught to keep an eye out for certain phrases found in the previously obtained chat records from criminals including sexual predators.

If the scanning software flags a suspicious chat exchange, it notifies Facebook security employees, who can then determine if police should be notified.

Keeping most of the scanned chats out of the eyes of Facebook employees may help Facebook deflect criticism from privacy advocates, but whether the scanned chats are deleted or stored permanently is yet unknown.

The new details about Facebook’s monitoring system came from an interview which the company’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan gave to Reuters. At least one alleged child predator has been brought to trial directly as a result of Facebook’s chat scanning, according to Reuters’ report.

When asked for a comment, Facebook only repeated the remarks given by Sullivan to Reuters: “We’ve never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it’s really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate.”

So right now, this just monitors chats between users, so you can still post updates about smoking weed… and honestly, even if it did monitor wall posts, no one probably would care about your weed smoking braggadocio anyway. This system sounds like it’s only looking for things like violent crimes, terrorist plots, extortion, prostitution, cyberterrorism and high level, big money drug and weapons dealings. So don’t freak the fuck out because you posted a picture of a bong.

Via