In the past, traditional vetting processes have leant primarily on official 'criminal records' to verify the potential criminal threat one might pose. This broadterm typically refers to criminal justice processing outcomes after criminal offense events.
In the world of risk analysis, these records have existed as a foundational basis for decades of assessments, but do they alone provide us with enough of the picture to assess true criminal risk?
While criminal records do shine an important spotlight on someone’s problematic criminal past, they don’t necessarily foresee one’s present-day intent. Just because one has a checkered past, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will commit another offense in the near future, but if that same person is exhibiting current behaviours and activities online that are criminal, or indicate a criminal desire, they are likely to commit further criminal acts.
From illegal interactions to active promotions and group affiliations, these interactions represent a crucial missing layer of intelligence when assessing an individual. Not only do they help us predetermine risk within different threat categories, but they also have the potential to identify intent before a criminal act has been committed or escalates further.
Essentially, they can help us foresee criminal outcomes before they happen. What’s more, these ‘unofficial’ datapoints have become much more prevalent in a digital age where people find themselves interacting increasingly online. But because they largely fly under the radar of law enforcement and so rarely reach someone’s official criminal record, they also remain inaccessible to standard assessment checks.
Our online activities are becoming an increasingly important part of our daily lives, reflecting how we communicate, socialize, and present ourselves to the world. It’s where people share opinions, personal experiences, interests, and emotions—sometimes more openly than they do in person.
As ouronline presence grows, so does the amount of personal information we reveal,often unintentionally. This makes it a powerful tool for examining someone’shidden characteristics, such as their true feelings, values, or behavioralpatterns. The way someone interacts online can offer insights into parts oftheir personality that might not be obvious in face-to-face interactions,making it a place where we may be able to understand people on a deeper level.
Of course, the online world shares many similarities with the real world in how we monitor our own behavior; we try to be kind to others, dress in a certain way, stress certain parts of our history, and try to avoid mentioning embarrassing facts. It’s a lot of the same old image control, but it also conveys residual indicators that can, over time, tell us a lot more than face-to-face interactions. It’s rather easy for people to misrepresent themselves in, say, a half-hour-long interview or on a first date. It’s much more difficult to monitor appearances and opinions over several years of online activities.
Accordingto Michal Kosinski, an assistant professor in organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, our forays through the online world offers significant clues as to who we are.
Our most intimate traits can be very easily predicted from a digital footprint, and a very general one as well, such as engagement “likes.” Such a wide range of digital footprints can be used in predictions, according to Kosinski, even broad measures, such as the number of your friends, number of your likes, how many times you log in, how many posts you have.
Each one might not be the strongest insight in isolation, but when you begin combining it with others and apply different variables of analysis, it can tell us a whole host of things about someone.
The bottom line is that in a modern digital age where security needs to utilize more proactive security intelligence strategies, the online world will soon become a pivotal frontier for criminal investigators. But for us to truly harness its preventative potential, we must begin to properly understand it first.
Satya Digital Ltd. is GDPR compliant company, meeting the requirements set by the EU & UK for handling personal data, alongside various privacy protection & information security laws in the US.
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