De-anonymising social media

As is often the case, perfection is both unnecessary and its implementation needlessly demanding of resources; all that is actually required is a sufficient successful prosecution rate to deter potential miscreants.  I’d therefore conjecture that no more than (say) a rolling 4-week window would be required for such a system to be effective with, by “big data” standards, a fairly modest data storage requirement.

These stored transactions then become available as evidence to subsequent investigations in the same way that wire intercepts and written communications were before social media.

There is a loophole in that use of a VPN would conceal all user activity.  That difficulty assumes a degree of user sophistication and applies to all user communications so is not addressed here.

Further, it is certainly true that dating sites, such as Tinder, provide a forum where those of criminal intent can seek victims. However the objectives of a typical user of a dating site are very different than those of a social media site such as Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat with evidence of face-to-face contacts likely to be available from, for example, mobile phone records or emails.  On this basis monitoring dating sites is likely to be both less effective and less necessary than monitoring social media.

Despite these weaknesses, the overall thesis remains that simply removing anonymity from social media transactions, thereby facilitating prosecution of miscreants, with no need for assistance from any overseas body, would help reduce the current Wild West nature of the medium.

While the collection and storage of this data might seem to some as the beginnings of a police state, the users of social media would do well to remember that all this information, and much more, is already held, and actively processed for profit, by those corporations that operate the social media sites they so willingly patronise.