Facebook’s chief security officer told the Drug Enforcement Agency in a letter Friday that any creation of fake user profiles as a part of sting operations amounted to a violation of the social media network’s terms of use and must stop.
The letter was prompted by a lawsuit against the DEA in which a woman alleged that agents had used photos obtained from her cellphone after a drug arrest to create a phony Facebook account.
“Facebook has long made clear that law enforcement authorities are subject to these policies,” Facebook security chief Frank Sullivan said in a letter Friday to DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart, according to the Associated Press.
Sullivan added: “We regard DEA’s conduct to be a knowing and serious breach of Facebook’s terms and policies.”
Facebook’s official policy prohibits: “Claiming to be another person, creating a false presence for an organization, or creating multiple accounts.”
The woman whose pictures were used, Sondra Arquiett of Watertown, N.Y., had been arrested in 2010 on drug-related charges that were later pled down to probation. She subsequently learned DEA agents had created a phony page with racy pictures of her in hopes of capturing dealers.
Arquiett demanded the agency take down the page, fearing it could jeopardize her family. The DEA’s fake page included pictures of her child and a niece. When the agency refused, she sued it for violation of privacy in 2013, demanding $250,000. The case is reportedly in mediation.
The DEA spokesman said it was investigating the incident and did not believe the practice was common.
The Justice Department, however, defended the practice in August by arguing that the woman had “implicitly consented” to the creation of the page by giving DEA agents access to her phone after her arrest.
“That’s a dangerous expansion of the idea of consent, particularly given the amount of information on people’s cell phones,” Elizabeth Joh, a professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, told BuzzFeed, which first reported the story earlier this month.
