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Thread: How Facebook could get you arrested

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    Default How Facebook could get you arrested

    Companies such as Facebook have begun using algorithms and historical data to predict which of their users might commit crimes. Illustration: Noma Bar
    The police have a very bright future ahead of them – and not just because they can now look up potential suspects on Google. As they embrace the latest technologies, their work is bound to become easier and more effective, raising thorny questions about privacy, civil liberties, and due process.

    For one, policing is in a good position to profit from "big data". As the costs of recording devices keep falling, it's now possible to spot and react to crimes in real time. Consider a city like Oakland in California. Like many other American cities, today it is covered with hundreds of hidden microphones and sensors, part of a system known as ShotSpotter, which not only alerts the police to the sound of gunshots but also triangulates their location. On verifying that the noises are actual gunshots, a human operator then informs the police.

    It's not hard to imagine ways to improve a system like ShotSpotter. Gunshot-detection systems are, in principle, reactive; they might help to thwart or quickly respond to crime, but they won't root it out. The decreasing costs of computing, considerable advances in sensor technology, and the ability to tap into vast online databases allow us to move from identifying crime as it happens – which is what the ShotSpotter does now – to predicting it before it happens.

    Instead of detecting gunshots, new and smarter systems can focus on detecting the sounds that have preceded gunshots in the past. This is where the techniques and ideologies of big data make another appearance, promising that a greater, deeper analysis of data about past crimes, combined with sophisticated algorithms, can predict – and prevent – future ones. This is a practice known as "predictive policing", and even though it's just a few years old, many tout it as a revolution in how police work is done. It's the epitome of solutionism; there is hardly a better example of how technology and big data can be put to work to solve the problem of crime by simply eliminating crime altogether. It all seems too easy and logical; who wouldn't want to prevent crime before it happens?

    Police in America are particularly excited about what predictive policing – one of Time magazine's best inventions of 2011 – has to offer; Europeans are slowly catching up as well, with Britain in the lead. Take the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which is using software called PredPol. The software analyses years of previously published statistics about property crimes such as burglary and automobile theft, breaks the patrol map into 500 sq ft zones, calculates the historical distribution and frequency of actual crimes across them, and then tells officers which zones to police more vigorously.

    It's much better – and potentially cheaper – to prevent a crime before it happens than to come late and investigate it. So while patrolling officers might not catch a criminal in action, their presence in the right place at the right time still helps to deter criminal activity. Occasionally, though, the police might indeed disrupt an ongoing crime. In June 2012 the Associated Press reported on an LAPD captain who wasn't so sure that sending officers into a grid zone on the edge of his coverage area – following PredPol's recommendation – was such a good idea. His officers, as the captain expected, found nothing; however, when they returned several nights later, they caught someone breaking a window. Score one for PredPol?

    Trials of PredPol and similar software began too recently to speak of any conclusive results. Still, the intermediate results look quite impressive. In Los Angeles, five LAPD divisions that use it in patrolling territory populated by roughly 1.3m people have seen crime decline by 13%. The city of Santa Cruz, which now also uses PredPol, has seen its burglaries decline by nearly 30%. Similar uplifting statistics can be found in many other police departments across America.

    Other powerful systems that are currently being built can also be easily reconfigured to suit more predictive demands. Consider the New York Police Department's latest innovation – the so-called Domain Awareness System – which syncs the city's 3,000 closed-circuit camera feeds with arrest records, 911 calls, licence plate recognition technology, and radiation detectors. It can monitor a situation in real time and draw on a lot of data to understand what's happening. The leap from here to predicting what might happen is not so great.

    If PredPol's "prediction" sounds familiar, that's because its methods were inspired by those of prominent internet companies. Writing in The Police Chief magazine in 2009, a senior LAPD officer lauded Amazon's ability to "understand the unique groups in their customer base and to characterise their purchasing patterns", which allows the company "not only to anticipate but also to promote or otherwise shape future behaviour". Thus, just as Amazon's algorithms make it possible to predict what books you are likely to buy next, similar algorithms might tell the police how often – and where – certain crimes might happen again. Ever stolen a bicycle? Then you might also be interested in robbing a grocery store.

    Here we run into the perennial problem of algorithms: their presumed objectivity and quite real lack of transparency. We can't examine Amazon's algorithms; they are completely opaque and have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Amazon claims, perhaps correctly, that secrecy allows it to stay competitive. But can the same logic be applied to policing? If no one can examine the algorithms – which is likely to be the case as predictive-policing software will be built by private companies – we won't know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them. And algorithms increasingly dominate many other parts of our legal system; for example, they are also used to predict how likely a certain criminal, once on parole or probation, is to kill or be killed. Developed by a University of Pennsylvania professor, this algorithm has been tested in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington DC. Such probabilistic information can then influence sentencing recommendations and bail amounts, so it's hardly trivial.

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    "Every step we can take to secure ourselves from a government that no longer respects our privacy is a patriotic act." .. (whistleblower Edward Snowden)

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    Yup......FB can also cost you your job. Aye!

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    wow, some real "eagle eye" sorta ish come to life huh?.. it was only a matter of time....
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    Quote Originally Posted by pcchick View Post
    Yup......FB can also cost you your job. Aye!
    Yup, anyone who didn't know this was prob living in a fantasy world. It can also prevent you from getting a job. Background checks have become ever so more detailed these days. I feel sorry for all those people on FB and Twitter that have all those party pics on there and they go looking for a job down the line...

    Quote Originally Posted by stigy View Post
    wow, some real "eagle eye" sorta ish come to life huh?.. it was only a matter of time....
    Yup, been going on for years... the consulting company I work for does something along this line to provide various police precincts with data like this to help stem crime

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    Quote Originally Posted by King_Jay16 View Post
    Yup, anyone who didn't know this was prob living in a fantasy world. It can also prevent you from getting a job. Background checks have become ever so more detailed these days. I feel sorry for all those people on FB and Twitter that have all those party pics on there and they go looking for a job down the line...

    Yup, been going on for years... the consulting company I work for does something along this line to provide various police precincts with data like this to help stem crime
    Thank you KJ when i post these things people think you are crazy and you are leaving in La La land but i always tell them FB and most of of these social media's will come back and bite us in the butt. People always say they have nothing to hide, what you don't understand is they don't just want data for offenders they want info on everybody. But as i always say you will find out soon enough because some things that are happening and will take place in the future. i can't explain but these social media's and google especially is not what a lot of people think it is. But a lot of so called techies are here and when you post tech news they call it crazy because their minds are limited tho the technology they see around them, but always remember the government is 25 years a had of us not the jamaican government who is 25 years behind. Follow real tech news not just gadget releases it is very important that you do
    IT'S YOUR GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO REMAIN STUPID
    You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth – nothing more.

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    Quote Originally Posted by theseeker View Post
    Thank you KJ when i post these things people think you are crazy and you are leaving in La La land but i always tell them FB and most of of these social media's will come back and bite us in the butt. People always say they have nothing to hide, what you don't understand is they don't just want data for offenders they want info on everybody. But as i always say you will find out soon enough because some things that are happening and will take place in the future. i can't explain but these social media's and google especially is not what a lot of people think it is. But a lot of so called techies are here and when you post tech news they call it crazy because their minds are limited tho the technology they see around them, but always remember the government is 25 years a had of us not the jamaican government who is 25 years behind. Follow real tech news not just gadget releases it is very important that you do
    Yup. You may think a party pic is innocent but a potential employer may see it differently. So I am always careful to what I put on the the Internet. If a company or person is willing to pay, they can dig up stuff about a person in a background check that many people don't know.

    A classic example is a job that requires security clearance. When these types of background checks are done they send people to your home, your friends, teachers, enemies everyone they possibly think knew you. Also don't think that because you are from another country you will skate by. They actually send people to where you came from, regardless of where in the world you come from etc...

    Companies who don't require security clearance are starting to employ methods like this, as to protect their image and property.

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    IT'S YOUR GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO REMAIN STUPID
    You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth – nothing more.

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    Quote Originally Posted by theseeker View Post
    that one nailed it lol.....

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    Minority report anyone?
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    People should just be careful on the internet. I try to use it in a way that if someone found out I was doing I would feel comfortable facing the consequences. Fb is just not something I am on all the time. Not my thing really once or twice a month I may spend two hours on it and thats it. Not really talking to any one on it only liking stuff that I should.
    The thing we should know is that the internet is wide open. Just do not do anything that would put you in problems. Remember that the internet as we know it is owned by the US as they have all the primary DNS servers and have moved not to have any other country share the responsibility of having one.
    If I remember correctly there are quite a few central commercial hubs that also have a Government agency on the same building. I do not see this as being coincidence.
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