In trying to catch up with everything going on in the world, here’s one that fell through the cracks. Drew Beechum, of the Maltose Falcons homebrew club fame sent me this over the holidays and it’s still relevant. It appears law enforcement is monitoring social media like Facebook to catch crooks … well, not crooks, exactly, but underage drinkers. And not just monitoring Facebook, but according to the LaCrosse Tribune, police actually created fake Facebook profiles then tried to friend underage kids (with or without probable cause, it doesn’t say) to look for mentions and photos of underage drinking. They’ve even made arrests. Beechum wades into the questions raised by this practice in a post titled We’ve Always Been At War With Eastasia. There are a lot of privacy issues raised by this, I think, and it bears watching IMHO.
So the kids are gonna learn to quit posting pictures of the evidence. Big brother’s not catching them in the act, just catching the ones who come out and say it to the world that they committed a crime. must be tough catching those criminals.
Hardly seems like a privacy issue to me… folks (kids and adults alike) are getting far too comfortable with posting far too much personal information online. I’m no lawyer and have never played one on TV (not yet anyway) but it seems to me that the courts would affirm that the info posted to social network and blog sites would be considered public information, pure and simple, and in no way an invasion of privacy. And I tend to agree.