March 11, 2008
Facebook Becomes a University's 'Lost and Found'
The University of North Texas is calling it a “crime-prevention program,” but the new Facebook application they are touting is more focused on what happens after a crime. The Trace-Facebook program, endorsed by the university’s police department, allows students to send lists of stolen or lost goods out to all Facebook members.
The hope is that someone will check Facebook before buying that used laptop or bicycle, see that it belonged to someone else, and call the police or the person who’s missing the goods.
The application also allows Facebook users to store descriptions of their valuables before they go missing. That’s going to either save time when reporting a loss or theft — or give some thief able to hack the Trace program a really good list of what a student has in his or her dorm room. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Tuesday March 11, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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This is a fantastic idea! I have posted a brief discussion about this service on my blog
— Bill Sodeman Mar 11, 05:14 PM #
Thanks for highlighting Trace. It really is a great tool for crime prevention, but the main point of Trace on Facebook is if your students save information about their property, they dramatically increase the chances of getting it back if it is lost or stolen. You mentioned that it would be a burglary list for anyone who can hack into the Trace application. The Trace app is only available to a user when that user is logged in through Facebook – that means nobody can hack the Trace application without having to hack into all of Facebook.com. At that point the hacker has a lot more on his hands than just a list of things to steal – he has the personal information of every single one of Facebook’s millions of users. Students choose to trust Facebook with their home address, class schedules and telephone numbers because Facebook has proprietary network monitoring tools constantly running in their system in order to prevent security breaches and protect the security of all their data. In addition, Facebook always posts to a secure page when users are logging in and employs industry standard encryption. However, if a student or parent is really concerned about hacking, they should use the www.MyThings.com application where they remain totally anonymous so, even if it was hacked, there is nothing about where the property is located or who owns it.
— Ken Bouche, Trace.com Mar 12, 03:18 PM #