YouTube Is The Newest Tech Crime Fighting Tool, But Crappy Video Quality Poses Challenges

Be careful what you upload to YouTube or any other video-sharing site for that matter. If your upload is a criminal offense in action, consider yourself convicted. That is, if the fuzz can move past the crappy video quality found on the likes of YouTube and actually identify you.

Several cases lately have found the world's stupidest video-sharers guilty of crimes they chose to broadcast to the world. Posting a video of you driving a car moving at 130 miles per hour in a 50 mile per hour zone could net you a 4 month suspended prison sentence. Hurl a cat 20 feet and face a 5-year animal ban (imagine explaining that one to an employer conducting a criminal record check). If you're extraordinarily stupid and choose to post a video of yourself raping or murdering someone, you might as well try out Google's new Video Adsense program so you can buy chips from the canteen where you live in federal prison. And believe it not, crooks have actually uploaded videos of themselves committing all of these acts on YouTube.

While this may make some parts of a criminal investigation easier on authorities, the lack of video quality on sites such as YouTube pose challenges as well. First off, cops must be able to identify the face of the person in question in order to make a positive identification. Unfortunately, the video quality is so poor on YouTube that this can require facial mapping and voice identification technologies. Secondly, an uploaded video used as evidence in a video trial must have a date, time and location attached to it. YouTube tracks upload times, but not necessarily the time and date of the actual video recording. The site can also monitor the location the upload is coming from, but this doesn't prove where the video was taken.

Oh, and by the way, if you're not the the criminal in the video, you could still be convicted of aiding and abetting a crime just for filming it and uploading it to YouTube, even though you actually had no involvement in the crime or with the parties involved.

Via BBC News

Read More in: Web TV

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Posted by Justin Davey at February 22, 2008 4:00 AM