Bloke accused of using cop's innocent Facebook snaps in child sex chat A Connecticut man has been taken to court, accused of stealing a cop's innocent Facebook photos for raunchy online chats with underage girls. According to a civil lawsuit filed by Joseph and Sarah Dzamko, the defendant Joseph Dossantos allegedly used Joseph Dzamko's pictures to represent himself when flirting with whom he …
.. to be careful what you put on Facebook.
I presume there's a way to protect images you upload? Perhaps people putting pics of themselves on public websites should think about what precautions to take. After all when the police come knocking on your door they're not likely to listen to you protestations of innocence, until your name's been dragged through the mud and you've been down to the station for 'a little chat to clear things up ...'
Perhaps, I think google+ can.
But they couldn't stop anyone taking a screenshot containing the photo, and cropping with an image editor.
Any photo of you on the internet will serve. So staying off fb wouldn't help
FB profile pics are just a mask, which might look like the person who owns the account. The cops might have realised this if the picture of a giraffe was used. Or they might have wandered down to the zoo with a step ladder to ask some questions...
"Dzamko soon found himself under scrutiny by his police force's internal affairs investigators"
If he'd been an ordinary citizen in the UK the police would have arrested him, destroyed his marriage, career and friendships, and then when he was finally proved innocent (possibly years later) have given him a vague management-speak apology and tuppence compensation.
If they hadn't managed to drive him to suicide of course.
What amount of money (that the guy obviously won't have) compensates for that amount of trauma? I'd imagine nearly losing your wife, job, family and friends and freedom wasn't amazing to live through.
Oh well, I suppose the $10/week payments he'll get until the guy stops paying will more than make up for it.
Scum.
"Today Evan Brown, attorney for tech law firm InfoLawGroup and curator of the InternetCases blog, told The Reg the case places an interesting spin on the debates over defamation that commonly arise on websites "
Translation from lawyer: "What's key here is that we have a new angle to exploit in order to monetarise misery"
I am no fan of the creation of additional laws and would not be in this case. However, it is pretty clear that something happened here that should attract sanctions and that the letter of existing law did not make it easy to do so.
Many years ago I wrote an article about the coming time when privacy would evaporate and how we would deal with it. I did not offer any clear prescriptive beyond making sure what you did was always something you felt you could live with if it became public or making what you do commonplace enough that it gets lost in the noise. What I did say was that we should recognize that it is on its way and prepare for it.
It does not matter if the vector is Facebook or not. Photos and videos of all of us are appearing everywhere and this will only get worse until you can never be sure what imagery of you is out there. I have no doubt that somewhere there is the ability to create clips of people doing stuff they never did that are indistinguishable from the real thing. If there isn't it is not very far away.
There a number of things coming that were never anticipated because they were impossible before. What can we do when pedophiles can create their own photo-realistic movies of scenes entirely repulsive to ordinary people, but which harmed nobody in their creation or use? What do we do if they use a photo-realistic model of your child for this? What if the scenario involved innocent people and was leaked to create an injury? How do you protect people from being punished on the basis of fake video evidence?
Lots of strange things are coming, but we have some idea of what they are and should be overhauling legislation so that it deals with these formerly impossible or improbable things.
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