According to a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Facebook has sent a letter to the Memphis Police Department (MPD) asking it to stop creating and using counterfeit accounts, fishing for information about their investigations.
As detailed in the letter from Andrea Kirkpatrick, Facebook's chief security officer and general counsel, MPD was told to stop creating falseaccounts on Facebook, as this is an explicit violation of the terms supply services and policies of the social network.
"Facebook has made it clear that law enforcement is also subject to these policies," Kirkpatrick said. "We consider this activity as a violation of Facebook terms and policies and therefore we have disabled the fake accounts we found in our investigation."
Fox13 got a response from MPD saying the faker accounts under the name Bob Smith was deleted before the Facebook letter was sent to the police.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation - Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)"The fact that Facebook's legal department applies the rule even to law enforcement agencies that knowingly violate social networking standards is a good sign as it balances out competition over disputed policies."authentic names".
The EFF presented evidence showing that law enforcement agencies, knowing that creating fake Facebook accounts violates the social network's terms and policies, choose to do so anyway, given that the information collected can be used in court. A common example is illegal network surveillance and collection of information by activists.