UK Police Force Presence On Facebook Causes Privacy Concerns

Back in April in the UK, Greater Manchester police became the first police force to become a permanent presence on the popular social network, Facebook. The force has since established a page called the GMP Updates, using the site for missing persons

They are the first police force within the UK to home in on the usefulness, for want of a better term, of the ever growing website network, Facebook. Since an overflow of missing persons, murders and other crimes related to young people who were a permanent fixture on the website, Greater Manchester Police have set up their own web page on the site for those users who wish for updates on news, crimes and missing persons. The police hope their presence will stop or at least open up and lot of the darker sides of the social network. The web page allows users to post their own stories of crime related incidences which will also encourage people to come forward and contact the police about other issues. The page will also allow users to link the site to their own web pages, which of course will add them to other contacts. Of course the Police will be keeping a close eye on the information which no doubt will be shared with them, and they have said that anything of a serious nature will be treated accordingly. Users can contact the police force directly as there will be an added link on the page which will go straight to the police's own external website. On the first day of going live, the police received 750 applications from users from Facebook as links were added to user's pages, which is what the force had predicted. They hope that this will encourage the rest of the 7m users who live in the UK alone to join in and keep the website free from crime. Rob Taylor, the chief constable for the Greater Manchester force has said in a statement at the launch,

"Greater Manchester Police is proud to be the first force in the country to use this new technology, and it demonstrates our commitment to exploring all avenues available to us to help fight and detect crime..."

The force hopes it will encourage other police forces in the UK and even in the US to join onto Facebook and other networking sites in the hope to keep up public awareness and crime down. Yet there is a down side to this seemingly wonderful idea - critics of the scheme are warning users that they may well be spied on by the police if they add the link to their own pages. Guilherme Roschke, who is a well respected fellow of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has stated that users may be sharing a lot more information with the force than they realise. As applications work on Facebook currently, when a user adds an application, they are then able to access a whole host of information including photos, addresses, contact numbers, political views, interests etc despite the "unable to be viewed by outsider" tag. Roschke said,

"Law enforcement use of applications will significantly expand the reach of what law enforcement can see, and also provides a more surreptitious viewing ability."

He also said that sites like that of the GMP could access data on users which could be easily linked to other information that the police can obtain anyhow. He added,

"It's not enough to carefully tune your privacy vis-a-vis other Facebook users. You also have to avoid adding in applications like the GMP Updates..."