Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity Report
Including Facebook, other social platforms are keeping a check on users’ chats to notify whether any criminal activity is taking place. If they find any suspicious behavior, the authorities will be informed to take a strict action against it.
This process does not allow social network employees to go through each chat; in fact they will be monitoring chats for mistrustful phrases and words that might give a warning sign. Such supervision will help the police keep an eye on culprits and terrorists.
A special software is used which monitors vulgar language and suspicious conversations. For example, conversations between users who do not have well-established connections or their profile data points towards an odd aspect, such as extensive age difference between them.
Don’t take this software light, since it is also capable of keeping an eye on phrases that were previously used in chat. This type of supervision can help in tracking down criminals such as sexual predators.
While monitoring, if Facebook employees come across suspicious conversations they will look into them and figure out whether the police has to be informed or not in order to avoid a false alarm.
It is not yet known whether the chats are kept saved or they are deleted after monitoring. Also, if the chats are kept hidden from Facebook employees then it will help Facebook prevent criticism on privacy issues.
With the help of Facebook chat scanning, a child predator was caught and brought to trial. On 1st April Facebook officials sent photos, login ID and password of a murder suspect to the Boston Police Department, which turned out to be quite effective in the investigation.
Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan appreciated this effort by commenting, “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.” He further mentioned that, “where appropriate and to the extent required by law to ensure the safety of the people who use Facebook.”
