The police department in Boscawen, N.H. have started the practice of posting people’s mugshots on Facebook.

One person claims to have lost a job when the police posted his name and mugshot on the social network.

Jacob Hooper is a local teenager who was arrested for underage drinking. He found out that his mugshot was posted on Facebook from friends who saw it online.

Now he is worried about how this digital public record could affect everything from college admissions to future employment.

The mugshots are posted on Facebook along with some arrest record details as well as the person’s court date.

The police department’s Facebook page was launched several months ago. The Boscawen Police department also posts events, unsolved crimes and arrests on the site.

The practice has outraged some local people, but the police department says that the arrest records and mugshots are all public records and therefore fair to use on a public site like Facebook.

The Boscawen chief of police notes that the mugshots and arrest record information are removed from Facebook after each case is resolved.

However, with server storage and the ability to copy and save digital information online, we all know that once digital, always digital.

You can view the Boscawen Police Department’s Facebook page here.

People are spending more of their online time on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as well as blogs, according to a recent report from Nielsen research study.

According to the study, US citizens are spending almost 25% of their online time on social-networks and blog sites. This is about 6 hours per month per person and is a huge increase from just a year ago.

The study also shows that Americans spend around 36% of their internet time communicating and networking with other people through social networking, blogging, e-mail and messaging.

The growing popularity of social networks has led to an increase in the sharing of online content between people.

Although social networks started out as a communication tool for younger people, it is now attracting an older people. Now twice as many Americans over the age of 50 use social networks than people under 18.

Many older people use social networks as a way to find and stay in touch with friends and family.

As the use of social networks grow, its newer converts seem to be an older group of people who are more varied in race and economic class, according to Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

[ Source: USA Today ]

A free people search on the Facebook social network has led to the reunion of a couple after 50 years apart.

Melody Longino, from Louisiana, met William McCrary while travelling on a Greyhound bus to Texas in 1957.

The two people stayed in contact for several years after meeting, but lost contact after that.

William recent did a people search on Facebook by searching for Melody’s name on the social network.

After finding her profile, William sent her a friend request through Facebook.

Now through the power of online social networking the two have been reunited after 50 years of lost contact.

Finding lost friends and family online has become easier than ever with social network searches and other online people search sites.

Video Link

This just in from Wired.com’s Danger Room blog: Google and the CIA are working together to monitor people on the internet real-time in order to predict people’s actions and behaviors as well as events.

The report states that both the Central Intelligence Agency and Google are backing a company called Recorded Future.

Recorded Future monitors the web in real-time and uses the information to predict the future.

Recorded Future can search and analyze many thousands of sites, blogs and Twitter updates to identify connections between people, groups, behaviors and events.

The company claims to use a “temporal analytics engine” that far surpasses modern search technology.

Recorded Future harnesses the chatter of online people and crowds to get insight into future events.

They measure each incident to find out who was involved, where it happened or when it could happen.

This collection of online buzz is then graphed to show the “momentum” for events.

According to the company’s CEO, Chris Ahlberg, “The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,”

Although Google has funded spy technology before, this is believed to be the first time that the CIA and Google have invested in the same company at the same time.

Both the CIA and Google have shown an increase in interest in mining “open source intelligence” and public information that is accessible to all, but is often covered in the constant barrage of television news, newspaper articles, blog updates, Twitter posts, web videos and other media updates.

Former CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a group of people in 2008 that “there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open”.

While Recorded Future analyses the real-time web to make predictions, they also store an index with over 100 million events.

Ahlberg told Wired.com, “We are right there as it happens We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future currently maintains a blog devoted to Intelligence Analytics at AnalysisIntelligence.com.

The CIA’s In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures both have seats on Recorded Future’s corporate board.

The news of Google’s new intel venture follows recent privacy issues involving the company. Concerns about how Google collects and uses its collection of search data.

Google collects and retains a mountain of personal data on every detail of people’s online search and browsing activities.

You can watch a Recorded Future demo below:

[ Source: Wired.com ]

A new personal data mining technology could make people searches and background checks faster and more reliable.

Many companies that collect people’s personal information have large amounts of information on individuals, but don’t have good technology for searching and analyzing all of this personal data.

Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer scientist from the University of Utah, has developed a data mining tool that makes the searching and analyzing of this personal data faster and easier.

Search engines like Google; Social networks like Facebook and retailers like Walmart as well as government departments are in the process of creating profiles of people. These people profiles contain hundreds of details on a person.

Your web searches, retail purchases, Facebook likes and social network of friends are all stored in multiple corporate and government databases.

Each of these details say something about a person. The trick is mining all of these details to get an overall picture of someone.

Venkatasubramanian and his coworkers have created a new way to mine multidimensional data on people.

He says that previous data mining methods have trouble analyzing personal information from more than 5,000 people. The new data mining method can easily crunch numerous details on more than 50,000 people.

Analyzing numerous details about people poses a problem because each personal attribute can impact other details.

Some common examples of companies using personal data mining include Amazon’s product recommendations to buyers based on their past purchases as well as the purchases of people with similar interests.

Netflix uses a similar personal data tool for recommending movies and Facebook recommends friends based on people who already are your friends as well as friends of friends.

The ever growing volume of this personal information from search engines, social networks and giant retailers is what makes the mining of details on people so difficult.

The new data mining technology can handle large amounts of personal data because it analyzes people’s attributes incrementally, rather than all at once. This speeds up the data mining of people because you can start without having all the information and mine a person’s information as you go.

Venkatasubramanian will discuss his new personal data mining tool on July 28 in Washington at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery.