Social Networks Put Police Officers in Danger

• Facial-recognition technology is helping law-enforcement agencies around the world catch the bad guys. But it can also be used against law-enforcement personnel, identifying undercover police, thus exposing them to risk.
• While many consumers are worried about the privacy implications of facial-recognition technology, for undercover law-enforcement officials, tools like Facebook could be deadly. In many police operations, officers immerse themselves in communities for months and even years. If a simple search reveals an officer’s identity, careful work and lives could be lost.
  At the Security 2011 Conference in Sydney, Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty warned of the dangers of facial recognition to law-enforcement officials. In a survey of Australian Federal Police recruits and New South Wales Police recruits, Keelty found that nearly everyone under 26 had uploaded a personal photo to the Internet. Eighty-five percent of the recruits use a major social-networking site, and nearly half of them use social-networking tools daily. Facebook was the most popular among recruits, with Twitter a close second.
  This combination of posted photos and the use of social networks with facial recognition presents a potential problem. According to Keelty, the problem is worsened by the fact that many young people now upload their photos to the Internet. If a teenager eventually decides to become a police officer, old photographs could reveal his or her identity.
  “It's too late because once it's uploaded, it's there forever," said Keelty. "If you have someone in the service who is trying to remain anonymous for whatever reason, it is still possible through other relationships to find them." For example, even if police officers have never put their own images online, it’s likely that they have appeared in someone else’s albums. Up to 85 percent of those surveyed have had their picture uploaded by someone else.
  With facial recognition and other forms of biometric identification becoming more common, these types of technology will put various other groups, such as crime witnesses, at increasing risks. While stricter privacy and information settings might help, new methods of protecting these groups will be needed as social networking continues to grow.