Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.
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.
I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If FB was concerned about privacy, they could have asked them to get a judicial warrant to perform a broad search.
But they didn't. And Lucy continued to be abused for months after that.
I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.
Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.
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...
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?
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.
It’s really sad now to see people getting angry at Facebook not having facial recognition technology.
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.
> The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."Move slow, build things.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/meta-researcher-warned...
Who needs the dark web when Meta exists and is protected by the US government?
Edit: downvotes? Lol
- there are 2.4B under 18 globally
- which means 500k is 0.02% of all children
- or around 1 in 5000 children globally, per day
- if evenly distributed (which is unlikely), then roughly 7-8% of all kids would feature in Meta exploitation yearly
That suggests very high reoccurrence; but even reoccurrence suggests the total rate remains quite high. A reoccurrence rate of 100x would suggest that roughly 1 in 1000 kids is exploited on Meta, yearly.
Anyway, disturbing.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/11/22/meta-strike-po...
> Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit which attempts to identify children appearing in sexual abuse material.
Horrific job though.
It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.
These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).
https://www.ice.gov/careers/hero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_for_Victims_of_Traffic...
Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.
"The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender."
I feel like the police should’ve started there: cross-referencing people in her close circle against a list of known sex offenders.
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house
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.
The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.
The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
With 40,000 couch sales, there would be roughly 120 sex offenders would have bought that couch. You can see what I mean about the registries being bloated.
Doesn't really narrow things down until you add the brick factory, but then they already had it down to 40 houses.
But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender. The offender could just be visiting, or the couch could have been moved to a different house since purchase (sold second hand, or the owner moved). And you are assuming the offender had been caught before, or was even on the sex offender registry for abusing children.
It’s really rather sick and deranged though that this kind of dynamic of women with children associating with sex offenders is not exactly rare. Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
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 even there are damn good liars out there.
70.6% of beaten children are beaten at the mother’s custody. Most often it turns out the choice of companion of the mother is inappropriate. While many see that as blaming the mother and it is a huge taboo in our society, it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
70.8% in the case of death. Source: CDC 2001-2006 if I remember. Incoming: Many ad-hominem about the source, it’s a problem that never gets addressed.
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?
They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.
Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.
This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.
Doesn't sound like paid DHS/ICE psyopper.
Any reason to think it is?
EDIT: Got the "you're posting too fast", so in reply to OP below:
> Submitter's nationality has nothing to do with it nor does his post history. WTF
Well, yes it does, its exculpatory evidence for a stranger you publicly accused of dredging up the news to try and win sympathy for DHS/ICE. (twice now)
Original post, by you: "It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE." This post, by you: "why do they need to dredge it up today?"
>Within hours, local Homeland Security agents had arrested the offender, who had been raping Lucy for six years.
We can't relax the claim to "well, it says DHS found a pedo, so it's propaganda ipso facto, because DHS did something good": they specifically argue the submission was the propaganda, specifically because it'd be absurd to claim it was published as DHS propaganda. (it's an article by the BBC)
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.
Did Britain's public broadcaster decide, half a decade ago, to begin making this documentary so that they could secretly and nefariously support a US government agency long before it was embroiled in its current controversies?
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.
Not so.
> Last summer Greg met Lucy, now in her 20s, for the first time. > Lucy (left), now an adult...
Edit: seven years in the making, so entirely coincidental
He should have been sentenced to six years of "let's see if we can push the limits of known horror" followed only then by a grizzly end, and share some sample images with his online sicko friends "this is what's coming from you".
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dark-agent-spotted-bedro...
blahaj•1h ago
belter•42m ago
belter•20m ago
"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...
stronglikedan•6m ago
GaggiX•32m ago
Old thread for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469681