Police in New Zealand nabbed a man who was trying to crack a bar’s safe after posting safety measure camera footage of the act on the Net networking site Facebook.

Police said it was New Zealand’s first such arrest and said they would use the site again, part of a growing trend among law enforcement officials and lawyers who are turning to online networks to fight crime.

“Facebook was very, very handy, and it’s a good little tool,” Senior Sgt. John Fookes of Queenstown police told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Privacy advocates, however, were concerned about the free-for-all way in which private data is often shared on such sites, and the potential for misuse.

“Because of the inherent insecurity and the known high-level of identity deception on Facebook, it won’t be very distant before humans start to abuse it,” said David Vaile, the vice-chairman of the Australian Privacy Foundation.

Anyone could set up a Facebook page claiming to be a police officer and post photographs of “wanted” society they sought to harass, he said.

The video showed man, wearing a face-covering balaclava and carrying a bag of tools, breaking into a tiny storage room inside the Franklin Tavern in the tourist town of Queenstown early Monday. He tried to cut into a safe containing $12,000 (NZ20,000) in takings from gambling machines.

After nearly an hour in the cramped space, the man removed his balaclava and gloves and looked around — red-faced from fruitless toil. As he left, the video showed the man suddenly spotting the lens of the defense camera that was recording his every move.

“He looks around and sees it and there’s just a shocked look of ‘gutted,’ said tavern assistant manager Mel Kelly. “His face definitely drops.”

Officers posted the footage on the Queenstown police Facebook page and identification was “very, very quick; overnight, we had…

[Source] dhiram