Blog 1: Connectivity

In 2004 the Dutch friends site Hyves was founded, now it’s 2007 and Hyves counts more than 3 million Dutch members which is 15% of the entire Dutch population. By being a member of this site you can message your friends or even complete strangers right away. Many contacts are made very day and this means that also criminals and gangs are using the website to chat with each other, and what’s a more sufficient way to trace criminals down than following their private life?

During the last decade the Dutch police traced many criminals down by their IP addresses of Hyves. One of these ‘Hyves-Catches’ was in September of 2007, a 29 year old man was beaten up by a person he didn’t know, but he did have a picture of him on his phone. After visiting the police a research was started to find out who the person in the picture was. It turned out that the person was an 18 year old guy which the police found on Hyves. Thanks to the address that he used on Hyves it was possible to arrest him right away. If we look with the eye on the future this is a very positive way of tracing down criminals.  In some cases where the authorities are helpless to find certain criminals it’s now becoming easier to trace them down. 

The technique is developing faster than we can ever expect. 10 years ago we were  ’stalking’ a person by listening to phone calls about what he or she was planning to do. And now we can just simply hack the persons account and discover everything that one has to hide. Addresses, phone numbers and an entire list of friends, if we have to rely on the future we are sure that more criminals are caught by using their own contacts against them. And this all, thanks to the internet.