POLL: Should Facebook Monitor Chats for Criminal Activity?
If you're a fan of social media, let us know what you think about Facebook's approach in today's poll.
Facebook users who chat often on the social media platform may want to think twice about the discussions they're having. That is, if those discussions fall into what could be considered as "suspicious."
The network, as well as other social media platforms, are now monitoring user chats for potential criminal activity, and subsequently notifying authorities if suspicious behavior is discovered, according to an article this week on Mashable.com.
A new software used by Facebook scans chats for keywords and phrases that could potentially fall into the "criminal" category, and 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, according to the report.
Meanwhile, it is not currently known whether the scanned chats are deleted or stored permanently.
So, we're wondering what you readers and social-media advocates in Norwood think about the matter. Should Facebook scan chats to ensure the safety of others? Or is this a breach of privacy? Let us know your thoughts in today's poll and weigh in with comments below.
Tom McClintock
7:17 pm on Sunday, July 15, 2012
This is a breach of privacy. The ability to miss-read words makes for a police-state mentality. How does someone determine the conversation between a grandfather and his twelve year old grand daughter versus a predator and possible victim? Safety at any price means giving up freedoms for most people!
Donna Lane
8:11 am on Monday, July 16, 2012
Call me naive or perhaps I don't know enough about how it works, but I don't think anyone who uses Facebook has an expectation of privacy. If privacy is expected, why not just send an email? Why broadcast your activities to large groups of people? I just don't get all this social media stuff. Even with that said, I agree with Tom that there is too much potential for misreading intent by random selection of words so I would not like to see this type of monitoring.
Simon A
9:54 am on Monday, July 16, 2012
This is breach of privacy. Where do we draw the line? Minds as well put a camera at every grocery store, coffee shop and dinner. Instead of allocating tax dollars to law enforcements give a break to small businesses who install a monitoring camera's and allocate some to Facebook initiative instead of raises to underperformed law enforcements.