Thursday, December 16, 2010

Zuckerburg Time Person of the Year as Facebook crime soars

More than 100,000 in Britain over last 5 years
Zuckerburg Time Person of the Year as Facebook crime soars. Online, Facebook, Cybercrime, Social networking, Stats,  0

Mark Zuckerburg, billionaire founder of Facebook, has just been made Time magazine's Person of the Year under the shadow of reports that Facebook is becoming a hive crime - both oniline and in the real world.

A report just out has marked Facebook as having a massive increase in associated crime, this has meant that over 100,000 calls have been made to police in the UK during the last 5 years; Facebook either being used in the detection of crime, or being the channel for which crime is perpetrated.

The news comes from a report in the Daily mail newspaper (not known for its under-stated reporting) which said that police chiefs in 16 forces revealed that 7,545 calls received in 2010 had been related with the Social networking site.

The size of this number contrasts with the 1,411 calls for the whole of 2005. Amongst the crimes committed on the site were frauds, sexual offences and hate crimes, as well as a large number of malicious messages.

The police stats also reveal that Facebook is being used to threaten and intimidate people, with a spokesperson of Kidscape saying: "We know that anonymous profiles can lead to a wide range of cyber crime, not least bullying and stalking".

"The sheer volume of personal information that individuals include in their profiles without activating all the appropriate privacy settings is a huge concern. These figures are an urgent reminder that we must increase our personal safety settings in cyberspace".

However, we need to remember that the Time Magazine award is given to the person judged to have had the most influence on world events for the past year - there's nothing about whether that influence needs to be wholly positive.

These figures are unlikely to bother the young billionaire however, who is clearly riding high on the Facebook wave. We also have to remember that Facebook does an awful lot of good, as it promotes sharing stuff - and we all just love to share, don't we.

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Tags: Online Facebook Cybercrime Social networking Stats

Zuckerburg Time Person of the Year as Facebook crime soars originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:03:45 +0000

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