Be careful when you get a random friend request; you don’t know who may be watching. Law enforcement authorities across the country have been routinely using fake Facebook accounts to gather intel on unsuspecting civilians, but the company says they want it to stop.
Facebook’s terms of use forbid fake accounts, but that hasn’t deterred the people over at the Memphis Police Department (MPD), which recently received a letter from the tech company demanding that they stop the practice.
After the Appeal reported on MPD’s use of fake Facebook profiles to get information on Black Lives Matter activists, Facebook did its own investigation. It subsequently deleted seven accounts it discovered were being used by Memphis police and updated its “Information for Law Enforcement Authorities” page to explicitly ban fake accounts.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that this is a good start, but they don’t think it’ll do much. The police have already been flouting Facebook’s rules. Cops act like they’re above the law in life-or-death situations. Would it be surprising that they would see breaking a website’s rules as no big deal? This isn’t an isolated incident, after all.
EFF raised this issue with Facebook four years ago, when the Drug Enforcement Administration was caught impersonating a real user in order to investigate suspects. At the time of the media storm surrounding the revelation, Facebook sent a warning to the DEA. But EFF felt that it did not go far enough, since many other agencies—such as police in Georgia, Nebraska, New York, and Ohio—were openly using this tactic, according to records available online.
Facebook is pretty useless at properly handling sexism and racism on its platform, so I would be surprised if they did anything more substantial about law enforcement. Meanwhile, be very careful about who you add to your accounts. Even if they get information while violating Facebook’s rules, police have still been able to use it as evidence in court.