I don’t know that advertising the existence of this team, or their methods, is a good idea.
Exactly. Or what feature (the wall) they used to rescue her.
To me this kinda sounds like helpful news to abusers. So they now cover the walls too.
Some things should not make news at all.
Things like this made the news several times when Interpol (or was it Europol?) showed pictures on social media and asked if anyone could turn them into information (things like “in which country is this backpack sold”).
When international law enforcement agencies are already openly crowdsourcing image details, an article about a group doing background detail analysis isn’t much of a revelation.
You’re right. I forgot about that interpol(?) Crowd sourcing.
Again, fuck Meta/Facebook for not helping.
I mean, I can see a case for not wanting to play dragnet at a mere request. You don’t want any random guy and/or agency to be able to have you to help them track down someone they only have a picture of, no matter how much they pinkie swear they’re doing it to protect that person.
That’s getting awfully close to sharing PII. You generally want to see a subpoena for this stuff and with good reason. Meta are, oddly enough, not being actively scummy here. (One can of course argue about all the other times when they don’t give a shit; the bigger picture is definitely super scummy. But for this in isolation they actually have a valid reason for their behavior.)
What might work would be a standardized, streamlined process where the police can ask the company and if the company says the request is reasonable they can apply for an expedited subpoena to allow legal access to the information. Agreement by both would be necessary to give more opportunities for due diligence. This process would also have to have a very limited scope in order to make abuse harder.
Great argument, except Meta and several other companies have willingly shared data with ICE to help with arrests.
But I agree, these things should be taken care of with a warrant (or similar) with a defined scope.
Yeah, that’s what I meant with the bigger picture. They have a valid reason to deny this request but they haven’t denied other requests that they really should’ve.
Facebook shares that info for profit with no problem, why not do the same to actually help people?
The fact they’ll eagerly help oppress people, but not one of the few times the authorities are doing something decent, tells you everything you need to know.
