Whether you realize it or not, a bundle of sophisticated technology is constantly scanning through Facebook interactions — wall posts, messages, chats — looking for sexual predators. A combination of intelligent software and human moderators can spot when a predator goes after an underage user and notify police almost in real time as the conversation is happening. The tools pull clues from users’ mutual friends, past interactions and age difference to spot potentially abusive conversations and compare them against archives of past interactions that have lead to assaults.It’s part of an aggressive effort the social network has made over the past few years to protect the safety of its 13- to 18-year-old users, and few would argue that the stated goals of the program aren’t sound. Nobody likes pedophiles. And nobody wants them picking up kids on Facebook.Still, there’s something unnerving about Facebook reading your messages, isn’t there? Preventing crime is one thing, but surveilling the most intimate user behavior is something completely different. At face value, it treats every Facebook user like a sexual predator. Facebook is obviously aware of the privacy concerns and insist that their technology only spots the bad guys. “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,” the company’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan told Reuters this week. Nevertheless, authorities say that existing systems are still inadequate for keeping pedophiles away from minors online. Said one special agent from Florida, “I feel for every one we arrest, ten others get through the system.”From the other side of the fence, though, it’s easy to think of Facebook’s anti-pedophile software as just another form of moderation. After all, Facebook employs an army of moderators to keep illicit photos from being uploaded, abusive language from being used in the comments and general trollishness from ruining others’ experience on the site. What more despicable trolls could there be than pedophiles looking for some underage kids to hit on? The vast majority of the scanning is also algorithmic, so it’s not like you have a bunch of Facebook employees poring over your every word. In truth, it’s a machine that’s trying to spot patterns and red flags. And don’t forget: it’s for a good cause.
Advertisement