A very smiley futures trader, Jérôme Kerviel, got his 30-seconds of fame today on the homepage of the Wall Street Journal earlier today. Jérôme was able to pull off one of the largest cases of trader fraud ever, amount to a whopping $7.2 billion loss for Société Générale SA. Rather than focusing on the details of what went down I’ll instead point out that the rogue trader has a Facebook profile that may provide clues.
While the profile is relatively empty, it does include a few of his friends at the firm that would be good to approach. Then again for $7.2 billion I’m sure the bank has an entire army of investigators looking into the accusations. Want to find someone’s associates and help bring an end to a case? Go view their Facebook profile or in some cases their MySpace profile. While profiles can be used to determine information about a criminal after they committed a crime, they can also be used to predict future actions.
After viewing the Frontline documentary, “Growing up online” yesterday, I began to wonder if one day we will have automated algorithms for analyzing Facebook profiles and determining if those individuals are likely to participate in self-destructive or criminal behavior in the near future. Following a slew of suicides related to online bullying, one would imagine that there may eventually be tools that can be used to predict the behavior of individuals on the site.
This walks a fine line though and makes me think of the movie Minority Report and the concept of arresting individuals prior to them engaging in future behavior. While it isn’t currently happening, there is technology that has been developed to perform these types of activities and those technologies are improving daily. Do you think it’s a good idea to use social network profiles to predict future behavior?
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Actually, the Guardian has a story about the fact that the facebook profile lost many friends from the Societé Générale Network in a few hours.But more interesting, and the Guardian didnt catch that, before leaving, some great friends he made had sent him gifts : handcuffs, and a 4 leaves Irish Luckcharms… Very nice indeed !
Comment by Thibaut Thomas — January 24, 2008 @ 11:43 am
Actually, the Guardian has a story about the fact that the facebook profile lost many friends from the Societé Générale Network in a few hours.
But more interesting, and the Guardian didnt catch that, before leaving, some great friends he made had sent him gifts : handcuffs, and a 4 leaves Irish Luckcharms… Very nice indeed !
Comment by Thibaut Thomas — January 24, 2008 @ 12:43 pm
Thought crime is death. Thought crime does not entall death. Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself.
Comment by Jonathan Kleiman — January 24, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
*entail
Comment by Jonathan Kleiman — January 24, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
Thought crime is death. Thought crime does not entall death. Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself.
Comment by Jonathan Kleiman — January 24, 2008 @ 5:21 pm
*entail
Comment by Jonathan Kleiman — January 24, 2008 @ 5:21 pm
"Do you think it’s a good idea to use social network profiles to predict future behavior?"Isn't that similar to the business model of social networks: profiling and predicting your behavior for targeting ads?
Comment by gr — January 25, 2008 @ 2:36 am
"Do you think it’s a good idea to use social network profiles to predict future behavior?"
Isn't that similar to the business model of social networks: profiling and predicting your behavior for targeting ads?
Comment by gr — January 25, 2008 @ 3:36 am
I don't think that it could be used to predict criminal behaviour, because as soon as anyone knows that the government is using Facebook to do this, people's behaviour will change. Adverts on the other hand, people don't care about and won't change their behaviour, so Facebook can target away.
Comment by David — January 25, 2008 @ 7:14 am
I don't think that it could be used to predict criminal behaviour, because as soon as anyone knows that the government is using Facebook to do this, people's behaviour will change.
Adverts on the other hand, people don't care about and won't change their behaviour, so Facebook can target away.
Comment by David — January 25, 2008 @ 8:14 am
I'm not sure about predicting future criminal behavior, but I sure wish Facebook had some sort of filtering process that when someone has been reported x times, they are banned completely. I wrote about my experience the other day with a pscyho on FB here: Facebook Abuse: Is Blocking People Enough?http://whyfacebook.com/2008/01/26/facebook-abus…..
Comment by Mari Smith — January 28, 2008 @ 7:46 pm
I'm not sure about predicting future criminal behavior, but I sure wish Facebook had some sort of filtering process that when someone has been reported x times, they are banned completely. I wrote about my experience the other day with a pscyho on FB here: Facebook Abuse: Is Blocking People Enough?
http://whyfacebook.com/2008/01/26/facebook-abuse-...
Comment by Mari Smith — January 28, 2008 @ 8:46 pm