Recently, there had been reports of the government wanting access to many peoples' Facebook accounts. These reports led people to complain about an invasion of privacy and rightly so. However, now there are reports on a local level of cops bringing in specialists and using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to help track criminals.
According to Newsday, in Nassau County when detectives arrest criminals they actually ask them for their Twitter handles. Meanwhile, in Suffolk County, their police say they troll Twitter and Facebook like the Nassau police for intelligence on criminal activity.
While this behavior is frowned upon by the social media sites as in some cases it violates their terms of service. "The social media sites prohibit them under their terms of service, but that isn't necessarily criminal" said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the San-Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation which seeks to protect internet civil liberties.
Long Island cops aren't the one's using social media to track criminals, police officers in Cinicinati are using social media sites like Facebook and Myspace to track criminals as well. Dawn Keating, who works for the Cinicinati Real Time Crime Center said, "Police officers may have to dig for it a little bit, but if you're the subject of an investigation, depending on the seriousness of the crime, we'll definitely take our time to find out that information." Keating is the first Cinicinati police officer to use social media as a crime fighting tool.
Below is a news report out of Washington about cops using social media to track criminals.