Right but I'll be honest, I've never thought about looking up the people I've dated in the past. No one really talked about it when I was younger. I don't remember my mother telling me to do criminal background checks on people I'm seeing.

Happened to me. Went out with somebody who turned out to be a serial shop lifter who operated with a small gang of other shop lifters. Everything looked fine up front until they disappeared when we had plans without contact for days. Thought I was ghosted. Turns out they were arrested.

A friend went out with someone who destroyed his car after he broke up because she was violent twords him. He had to get a restraining order. A friend of his dug up a link to a FL police site. Turns out she did a little time down there for assaulting another woman, beating her with a coat rack during a fight. He never thought to look her up either and she seemed nice at first. Shit happens. Don't blame the victim for not being paranoid that everyone they're dating might be a criminal. Especially when there are damn good liars out there.

How many of these sex offenders bought this couch and live close to this brick factory in homes built in that time period?

The whole thing about people getting put on the sex offender registry for public urination is a myth and there's no verifiable cases of it happening. There are two cases that are relatively close. The first is James Birch, who pled guilty to indecent exposure for peeing on a Taco Bell because he was representing himself and didn't understand that meant he'd have to register as a sex offender. He realized his mistake and the court let him undo the plea and the charges were dropped. The second is Juan Matamoros, a meth dealer from Florida who claimed in the mid-2000s that the reason why he got put on the Massachusetts sex offender registry in the 80s was public urination. Due to the age of the case and Massachusetts privacy laws the court records aren't publicly available and his lawyer from the 80s responded to a request for interview about the case with "no judge I am aware of would allow someone to be put on the sex offender registry for peeing in public".

If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.

I hav heard this many times, but never found a single example - and I’ve looked. Everyone I’ve researched on the registry richly deserved it.

I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.

> some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination

When minor offences can get people put on the register, this dilutes the meaning of being on the register.

Every actual sex offender will claim they're on there not because of the serious crimes they committed, but because they went nude on the wrong beach, or something similarly minor.

The salient point was that the person was in a relationship to the child’s mother.

Exactly, it sounds like they didn't know who the girl was from photos alone; "Lucy" was just a name they gave the victim.

That would make sense. Thank you.

There's been several cases of mothers being put in jail for child negligence in such situations in my country.

> While many see that as blaming the mother

Yes, that's how I see it.

> it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.

"Sanctions"? This is an article about successful digital sleuthing, but your takeaway is that we need to punish the mother?

Most crimes like this are, sadly, committed by someone who has some connection to the family. It’s standard to investigate connections first. That’s not “appalling” to suggest, it’s just a sad reality of these crimes.

They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.

The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.

True. Damaged parents are often the kinds of people who are taken advantage of by sex offenders. I think it requires a social fix of some kind.

You are right, the article is about:

> She said at the point Homeland Security ended her abuse she had been "praying actively for it to end".

You can provide your plausible suggestions as to what the family relationship looked like that the girl could neither ask her own mother for help nor was her father there for her.

You don't need to imply they didn't read that part, because it doesn't really affect the point of the comment, that Facebook doesn't actually care about privacy. Even if they're not sharing things willy-nilly, they're still aggressively tracking everyone they can.

just remember even the patriot act started with good intentions, to get justice.

Google photos has the advantage of a limited search space. Any photo you take is overwhelmingly likely to be one of the few faces already in the library. Not to say facebook couldn't solve the problem. But the ability of Google to do facial recognition with such poor inputs is that it's searching on 40~ faces rather than x billion faces.

> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here

This story was from more than a decade ago.

Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.

> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.

Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?

The EU AI act activates this year. Facial recognition is in the restrictive list. You don't want to give auditors ammunition before it goes live as top fine would cost FB around $4B, and wouldn't be a one time fine.

Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.

[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)

I would hazard a guess that the facial recognition will limit the search scope to people associated (to some degree) with your friends account and some threshold of metrics gathered from the image. I doubt it is using a broad search.

With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.

Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.

> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here

This case began being investigated on January 2014 [0], which means abuse began (shudder) in 2012-13 if not earlier.

Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [1] in June 2015 [2]

Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [3] and Image-Based Crowd Counting only began becoming solvable in 2015-16.

> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.

Yes. But it is 2026, not 2014.

> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made

I'm sure there are plenty of amoral choices he can think about, but not solving facial detection until 2015 is probably not one of them.

---

While it feels like mass digital surveillance, social media, and mass penetration of smartphones has been around forever it only really began in earnest just 12 years ago. The past approximately 20 years (iPhone was first released on June 2007 and Facebook only took off in early 2009 after smartphones and mobile internet became normalized) have been one of the biggest leaps in technology in the past century. The only other comparable decades were probably 1917-1937 and 1945-1965.

---

[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/bbc-eye-documentary-t...

[1] - https://research.facebook.com/publications/deepface-closing-...

[2] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-can-recognize-you-just...

[3] - https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/vgg_face/

Facebook rightly retired their facial recognition system in 2021 over concerns about user privacy. Facebook is a social media site, they are not the government or police.

When people on hacker News talk about requiring cops to do traditional police work instead of doing wide ranging trawls using technology, this is exactly what they meant. I hope you don't complain when the future you want becomes reality and the three letter agencies come knocking down your door just because you happened to be in the same building as a crime in progress and the machine learning algorithms determined your location via cellular logs and labelled you as a criminal.

The two views aren't necessarily in conflict. I don't appreciate Facebook's use of facial recognition technology, but they built it. I'm extremely disappointed they proceeded to use this technology to influence elections while fighting against making the data available to law enforcement. I understand this may not have been intentional on their part, but the result is the same, and I was not at all surprised by it.

I can't help but notice the exact wording of FB's response - or rather what they didn't say.

If someone asks me to do them a favor, I have basically three options for a reply:

• I can and I will;

• I can but I won't; or

• I am not able to.

FB's answer was not option 3.

I think a more plausible explanation is that FB did not want to set a precedent of being the facial recog avenue of choice for the Fed.

Facebook did nothing to assist in narrowing a search area.

What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.

It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-rape-carroll-trial-fe68259a...

"Judge says E Jean Carroll allegation Trump raped her is ‘substantially true’ in court dismissal" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/07/donald-trump...

Sure... so now we end up with people watching abuse 9 to 5 to train AI. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/05/i...

Yeah, I looked into it, and ICE actually has two distinct components: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Pretty much everyone things ICE == ERO, so you've got stuff like Canadians agitating to close the HSI collaboration offices in Canada.

HSI was primarily the main investigative body responsible for human traffic and crimes against children prior to this administration. The second largest federal investigative agency behind the FBI (6k agents). Now doing immigration enforcement.

Coyotes are frequently part of criminal organizations. They take advantage of people in any and every way that they can. Slavery, sexual and otherwise, is not at all an uncommon result of being brought into the country under the radar, so to speak.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse

yeah and from the article, it sounds like they chat with the perps and befriend them to build trust.

Probably a reference to the shutdown.

Unbelievable. I mean, believable.. but WTF?

I'd argue the DHS is incidental and the real story is "law enforcement deserves open access to social media feeds." In this light, the BBC's angle becomes much clearer.

What better way to bolster your reputation than to get your buddies to prop you up with fluff pieces? Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

>You are awfully cynical.

A cynic is simply a realist who has seen too much shit. I am a firm realist. I see the world as it is and hope that others will come along to help make it better but I don't naively hold my breath.

DHS needs a win in the public's eyes. BBC has the air of a trusted platform. It is no big stretch to make the connection that dredging up an old story about tracking down and capturing a pedo using an elite DHS unit would be a useful tool to win back some public support. You notice that there are no dates given in the article so the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago. It looks new and fresh.

Propaganda. I don't have to be gullible so I choose not to be.

Submitter's nationality has nothing to do with it nor does his post history. WTF

I suggest you read the article as it appears from your initial (pre-edit) reply that you didn't. Put this in context with contemporary events involving DHS/ICE and assimilate the knowledge that the story related happened more than 10 years ago. Then ask yourself, since this same story was already reported more than a decade ago, why do they need to dredge it up today?

Do some critical thinking so that you don't come across as a gullible shill.

From the fine article itself:

>Within hours, local Homeland Security agents had arrested the offender, who had been raping Lucy for six years.

> The term "agent" with regards to law enforcement substantially predates "agent" in the context of AI.

The GP's account was created in 2019, so being born yesterday is not an excuse available to them.

To be fair, I initially had the same thought, and the HN item just two below this as I write also has agent (but the LLM kind) in its title.