Is Facebook The New Robocop?
Social networking sites are no longer just a way of killing time on the Internet. Online social networking services like Facebook are an extension of our everyday lives, and the line that differentiates the goings-on of the real world from those of its virtual counterpart continues to blur. With nearly a billion people on Facebook worldwide, the website processes approximately five hundred terabytes of data every day, including photos, videos, location-tagged posts, and a large bulk of text containing extremely personal data. Furthermore, each of these things are attached to a profile, most of which belong to a real person (it is estimated that a sizable chunk of Facebook profiles belong to fake accounts), and each of these profiles is linked, via “friending,” to profiles of real life friends and connections. When Facebook was still growing, few people saw it as anything more than a way for kids to casually chat with friends online; though that is still its purpose at its core, the vast growth that the site has underwent, as well as its increased importance in today’s society, allows for practical, real-life applications of the service that have the potential to better society.
Criminal gangs are real-life examples of a functioning social network. When a gang admits a new member who they trust, they are adding another node to their network with a positive tie. When examined on a greater level, each gang, including its collective network as a whole, forms negative ties with its rival gangs.
Now this is where Facebook ties in. Since Facebook has become popular, it has become an extremely popular place for gang members and affiliates to not only interact with other members of their gang, but also intimidate their rivals. It may be as simple as uploading an intimidating photo or a location tag outside your rival’s house. The selling point is the way Facebook is designed, which allows only Facebook friends to see these posts; gang members target an audience of their peers and rivals, who are the only people capable to see their posts.
This is a false sense of security, as law enforcement officials have been using social networking services for investigatory purposes since the websites have been around. Law enforcement officials are legally allowed to use online aliases if they are given approval by their department, and they have been able to do so for a considerable amount of time. A gang’s online presence can be hard to infiltrate as an outsider, but techniques have been developed and improved since the emergence of Facebook.
Evidence from Facebook has proven invaluable to modern criminal investigations when the right tactics are employed; however, the art of law enforcement officials creating fake profiles is dying. This week, Crowd Sourced Investigations, LLC announced their development of a revolutionary crime-fighting tool called Connected to the Case. The program requires a user to grant it access to their Facebook account, and after authorization pulls the user’s data and matches their significant dates, locations, times, relations, and demographics to unsolved crimes that they may unknowingly have a connection to. Since the announcement of the service, pre-registration for the service opened up for law agencies. If enough people give their information to the service, law enforcement officials can have a systemized database of any information pertinent to their case.
Even if the service does not revolutionize criminal investigation, people are making the strides necessary to use Facebook to its full potential. Facebook reveals the once invisible connections that link the people of the world to one another, and it makes a billion people’s lives that much better. But if you’re in a gang, you might want to think twice before signing up.