Two weeks ago I read an article about a manager of a gas station who caught a thief with help from Twitter and Facebook. A guy refuelled his car and drove away without paying for the gas. The manager posted a tweet and a Facebook tweet with the guys’ license plate and a screenshot of the camera images and asked who recognizes the car, license plate and person. The message was retweeted and shared a dozen times. A few people recognized the person and car and the guy is now sued for stealing.
Another gas station manager happened the same thing. He also decided to post a tweet and Facebook message with a screenshot and license plate. Within a few hours he received many phone calls from people recognizing the perpetrator. That same afternoon the phone rang and a man asked the manager whether he could remove the screenshot from the internet because it was violating his privacy. The manager told him that he would remove the screenshot, if he would come by and pay the €96 he owned him. Finally the guy paid the €96 and the manager removed the screenshot.
Both managers recommend doing this, because they think it is way more effective then calling the police. I think it is actually pretty amazing what social media can do. It is so easy to share stuff with so many people at the same time. And of all 16 million people in the Netherlands, within only a few hours there were so many people who recognized these guys. However the question is whether it is allowed to violate people privacy like this.
Do you think that social media should be used more frequently in cases like these, or do you think that peoples’ privacy is more important?
This discussion has been going on a while now.
– Google Earth and Streetview photographed the entire world for their Location Services.
– Telecom companies track all the data to improve and customize consumer packages to increase profits. Supermarkets track wat consumers buy on their ‘Bonuskaart’ to offer nice discounts.
– The CIA taps phonecalls to fight terrorism.
And so on and on. People keep complaining about privacy. But honestly why? If everything would be as some people want it we would have Al-Qaida bombing our homes, Google Maps wouldn’t be as great as it is now and companies wouldn’t be able to satisfy all consumer needs. And let’s face it if you’re an honest person doing an honest day’s work, what effect will it have on you?
I think it’s indeed amazing how fast a screenshot like this is spread on social media. It would take the police possibly a couple of days to find and arrest those thiefs. In cases like this, it is far more effective to use social media. And it can be used in many more cases, like with street robberies, missing persons, etc. Besides, it also saves work for the police, so they can focus on other things instead.
Those people are the ones who committed a crime, so I don’t really think they have the right to start talking about privacy if they did wrong. It is more than logical to put out a picture or video online so the culprit can be caught sooner. Sure, those thieves wouldn’t want their picture (showing they did something bad) to be all over the Internet, it has some privacy involved, because once the case is over, and even if the picture is removed by the owner, who knows who else has the picture. Once it is on the Internet, it pretty much could wander on the web for a long time. In that point of view, I would see some privacy violation issue involved, but still to catch the culprit is what matters, and their privacy is the last thing to worry about in those cases.. Overall, I do agree that in these cases social media can be very effective, it actually surprises me that it’s working pretty well 🙂
I think it’s a great approach, it obviously has proven to be very successful. However, I do think it becomes very easy to try to solve everything by yourself and leave the police out of it. A cooperation between the two would probably be best. The police is active on social media, and for these kind of (relatively small) crimes I think it’d be very successful if they’d start spreading those screenshots on the Twitter account of the Rotterdam police office, for instance. This way, they’ll keep it regional, but you will have a much bigger audience than the gas station manager does with his own social media.