Facebook chats and POST scans in search of criminal activity

Facebook is adding new features that act as a detective scanning conversations in chat rooms and posts of users in the U.S., so that using data mining system scans to detect criminal activity themselves.

If the social network detects suspicious behavior, brand content and determines whether further action, inform the police, must be carried out. The source of this new ad is from a Reuters interview with director Joe Sullivan Facebook Security. This is the introduction to the Reuters story :

A man of about 30 I was talking about sex with a 13-year-old South Florida and is scheduled to meet with her after school classes the next day. The scanning technology Facebook automatically dials the conversation for later review and employees will quickly call police. The officers took control of the PC of the teenager and arrested the man the next day.

Facebook software focuses on suspicious situations. For example, if two users who were not friends begin to talk a lot, have no mutual friends, interact with each other very little, have a significant age difference, and / or are far from each other, the tool pays special attention.

The exploration program for certain phrases that have been found previously in the chat logs of criminals, including sex offenders. The system automatically raises the alarm and then must be an employee of Facebook that reviews and makes the final decision of whether to ping to the authorities.

"We never wanted to create an environment where we have employees looking to private communications, which is really important for us is that we use technology that has a very low rate of false positives," says Sullivan told Reuters.

Although details of the tool are still scarce, it is well known that Facebook is cooperating with the police, because, like any company, must comply with the law. In fact, only a few months ago, Facebook comply with a court order by sending the police over 62 pages of photos, wall posts, messages, contacts and past activities at the site of a murder suspect.

For more information on Facebook's position in its cooperation with the police can see these references: Law Enforcement and Third-Party Matters , as well as Information for Law Enforcement Authorities

So far Facebook will not talk very highly of the issue, apparently so that people do not think that your employees read the conversations that are posted on the network, highlighting whenever an automatic Software.