Detectives catching criminals on Facebook
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EUGENE, Ore. -- Facebook users shouldn't share information that they don't want to see in headlines, the Eugene Police Department said. With the increasing popularity and false sense of privacy that some find on social networks, police are using what people share to catch criminals.
Social media has become a useful tool for local police departments to fight crime and locate missing persons. EPD recently apprehended two people believed to be involved in a robbery at the Skybox Apartments near the University of Oregon campus.
Facebook officials said that posts on its social networking website cannot be erased with the click of a mouse. The social networking site keeps a lot of the information and are able to retrieve words and photos long after they have been deleted.
As Lieutenant Doug Mozan of EPD said, many criminals haven't realized how much information that law enforcement officials can access on Facebook or other social network sites.
"The reality is that anything you post is a lot more open than you realize. And information that people put on public domain is accessible to all." Mozan said.
Lieutenant Mozan said that while anyone can click from person to person to find connections, police have special techniques to find leads into cases. Police department officials hope to guard these techniques so criminals don't find better ways of hiding information.
Amazing that people use that police state spy website. Listen people you have no more privacy, 20,000 drones and a network of government spy agencies will see to that.