Facebook reads private chats to prevent crimes

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Preventing online crime sometimes causes an outcry: on one hand, it is increasingly necessary to monitor user activities, while on the other, many raise privacy concerns.
This is what is happening in these hours, following the news thatFacebookcanread the private chatsof its members.
Directly from the headquarters in Palo Alto, the home ofFacebook, there has been confirmation that a special digital surveillance service has been established.
No employee will physically and preliminarily read all conversations between users: an algorithm will do it.
The system is particularly useful in exposing potentially dangerous situations especially harming boys and girls: much of this project is indeed born as a control tool in the fight against pedophilia.
The algorithm keeps track, for example, of conversations between people with a marked age difference or who live far apart; it also evaluates how long they have been friends and if they have common contacts; finally, it is able to recognize insidious phrases.

Based on past examples, the system can report expressions used by other pedophiles, alerting a dedicated staff both to the conversation and to the “incriminated” profile.
Only at this point can the human eye read the contents of the chat, assessing the actual significance of the phrases and words.
The person in charge can then decide to report the incident to the competent authorities, handing over the content of the conversation to the authorities.
To date, it has not been clarified whether conversations flagged by the automatic system are also saved and if, once the non-severity of the situation is assessed, they can be deleted.
It would be inconvenient to end up in the folder of alleged online pedophiles due to a false positive decided by an algorithm.
Many therefore wonder if the sacred security to be guaranteed to weaker subjects could be the gateway to access private conversations.