4 ms·

Playing devil's advocate: Social media data is public, and morons brag about their crimes on Facebook all the time. Law enforcement should use it to help catch

Playing devil's advocate: Social media data is public, and morons brag about their crimes on Facebook all the time. Law enforcement should use it to help catch crooks or prevent crimes. This is obviously ripe for abuse, as in OP's case, but if some MAGA cultist Tweeted about hanging Mike Pence, and he got pulled-over driving into the Capital on the morning of January 6th, maybe the cops should give him a little extra questioning. Not so sure I'd be mad at that.

oliv__ 5y ago
The only way you can justify this point of view is by using the most extreme case where you have implied violence in a public medium. 99.9% of people's facebook posts don't look anything like that. You're essentially using the argument of "if you have nothing to hide, why should you be against this"
- jimt1234 5y ago
  Good point (extreme case). However, the "nothing to hide" argument isn't relevant because nothing is hidden; this is all public data. The quick counter-argument seems to be, "You're not trying to hide, so you've got not claim to any sort of privacy rights." And, once again, I'm pretty much just playing the devil's advocate. My real concern isn't so much the visibility of the data, it's the analysis of the data. Any conclusion can be drawn from any data set, given sloppy enough analysis. I learned this back in the 90s, doing performance testing for a large pharma, comparing an app written in C and the same app written in something called "Java". My mentor, and old school C programmer, told me, "The data is what we say it is." Guess what? The app written in C performed better, and the young punk "Java" programmers lost the contract. The bad old days. The point is, if cops are buying this data and the analysis, the data companies know what the cops want, and they'll give it to them. That's scary.

4 ms·

Playing devil's advocate: Social media data is public, and morons brag about their crimes on Facebook all the time. Law enforcement should use it to help catch

by jimt1234 5y ago

oliv__ 5y ago
The only way you can justify this point of view is by using the most extreme case where you have implied violence in a public medium. 99.9% of people's facebook posts don't look anything like that. You're essentially using the argument of "if you have nothing to hide, why should you be against this"
- jimt1234 5y ago
  Good point (extreme case). However, the "nothing to hide" argument isn't relevant because nothing is hidden; this is all public data. The quick counter-argument seems to be, "You're not trying to hide, so you've got not claim to any sort of privacy rights." And, once again, I'm pretty much just playing the devil's advocate. My real concern isn't so much the visibility of the data, it's the analysis of the data. Any conclusion can be drawn from any data set, given sloppy enough analysis. I learned this back in the 90s, doing performance testing for a large pharma, comparing an app written in C and the same app written in something called "Java". My mentor, and old school C programmer, told me, "The data is what we say it is." Guess what? The app written in C performed better, and the young punk "Java" programmers lost the contract. The bad old days. The point is, if cops are buying this data and the analysis, the data companies know what the cops want, and they'll give it to them. That's scary.