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Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Block Tool For Cops To Surveil You On Social Media (vice.com)
On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of California announced that, after the organization obtained revealing documents through public records access requests, Facebook and Instagram have cut off data access to a company that sells surveillance products for law enforcement. Twitter has also curbed the surveillance product's access. Motherboard reports: The product, called Geofeedia, is used by law enforcement to monitor social media on a large scale, and relies on social media sites' APIs or other means of access. According to one internal email between a Geofeedia representative and police, the company claimed their product "covered Ferguson/Mike Brown nationally with great success," in reference to the fatal police shooting of a black teenager in Missouri in 2014, and subsequent protests. "Our location-based intelligence platform enables hundreds of organizations around the world to predict, analyze, and act based on real-time social media signals," the company's website reads. According to the ACLU, Instagram provided Geofeedia access to its API; Facebook gave access to a data feed called the Topic Feed API, which presents users with a ranked list of public posts; and Twitter provided Geofeedia, through an intermediary, with searchable access to its database of public tweets. Instagram and Facebook terminated Geofeedia's access on September 19, and Twitter announced on Tuesday that it had suspended Geofeedia's commercial access to Twitter data.
1) form new shell company
2) make website that throws up stupid quizzes and such with topics that appeal highly to people you want to monitor
3) hoover up every ounce of data you can suck out of the FB API
4) sell results to law enforcement, advertisers, etc etc
5) profit! (notice the lack of "?" yeah, me too.)
If discovered and rejected/blocked by FB, restart at step 1), with the bonus of having the existing databases to plug the new website into.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
How dare people monitor what people post publicly?
It's OK for the police to track your movements via fake phone towers, because you're publically transmitting that data anyway.
It's OK to place audio-bugs around the city to listen in on people walking around, because they're in a public place.
It's OK to have license-plate readers on every road to track people's travel habits because they're out in public.
We're all out "in public" or say things "in public" where the public could overhear us, or see us. That doesn't make tracking or bugging the general public OK. It's one thing to casually over hear someone, or read what a stranger posted. It's an entirely different animal to go out and track an individual or a group of individuals and monitor their every move and utterance. Even in public we have an expectation not to be stalked.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
For decades now, the only people who could run for president were those who knew they would be politicians at a very early age and lived lives of deceit from the start.
The positive way to look at this is that weasels won't be able to hide their dirt in the future. But the way the media is handling Hillary doesn't make me optimistic though. It only works if you have honest reporting.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The reality is just about everyone says some in appropriate, poorly considered, things in bad taste some times. The fact that its all searchable and forever in public now is what has changed.
Agreed.
I don't see the problem with law enforcement data mining peoples public statements for stuff related to current events/open investigations.
This is assuming that law enforcement is objectively and dispassionately prioritizing their enforcement activities. Do you trust the current U.S. Department of Justice to do so, say, relative to Hillary Clinton? I don't. We have arguably people who have done the exact same things now in prison. In her case the FBI Director went ahead and decided he's now in the judicial branch, rather than the law enforcement and investigation branch, and went ahead and declared on the judicial branch's behalf that "no reasonable prosecutor" would pursue the case. As it's been said, with the number of laws on the books, everyone is guilty of something every day--what has prosecutorial effect is what and whom the law is focused on as a target. Who do you trust to make those decisions, and will you trust the unknown people doing so in 5 years?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?