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Surveillance Firm 'Geofeedia' Cuts Half of Staff After Losing Access To Twitter, Facebook (chicagotribune.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cause-and-effect dept.

In mid-October, an American Civil Liberties Union issued a report accusing police of using Geofeedia -- a CIA-backed social-media monitoring platform -- to track protests and other large gatherings. As a result, Instagram, Facebook and eventually, Twitter cut the company off from its valuable data stream, causing them to cut half of their staff to "focus on a variety of innovations" that will allow them to serve their customers and continue their "rapid growth trajectory as a leading real-time analytics and alerting platform." Chicago Tribune reports: Geofeedia cut the jobs, mostly in sales in the Chicago office, in the third week of October, the spokesman said. It has offices in Chicago, Indianapolis and Naples, Fla. The cuts were first reported by Crain's Chicago Business. An emailed statement attributed to CEO Phil Harris said Geofeedia wasn't "created to impact civil liberties," but in the wake of the public debate over their product, they're changing the company's direction. Harris said Geofeedia's software has been "impactful" for schools, sports leagues, customer service, marketing and event planning, per the statement. He also referred to the company's $17 million funding round in February -- which brought its total funding to nearly $24 million -- and "strong sales and growth" as strengthening the company. "Our strong financial position has allowed us to carefully consider the appropriate areas of focus for our technology going forward," Harris wrote in the statement.

4 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Civil Liberties by ConnerT · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What Civil Liberties...

    1. Re:Civil Liberties by rtb61 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Fuck worrying about civil liberties, these guys surveil for profit, produce nothing actionable and they'll be dropped, so they will fabricate by selectively shifting data from one source to another, deleting contrary data and straight up fabricating data. Their profits have to be based upon it. Nothing to report, they go bankrupt, something to report (tough luck for their victims) and the profits roll in. Exactly the kind of people who were used to create 'Anonymous', it can be fun but those ass hats are extremely dangerous and will fabricate all kinds of lies as truth in order to fabricate profits. It is insane to put that kind of power in contractors who have a built in profit motive to lie. Stupid enough to do that and they will be manipulated into serving other people's purposes.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  2. CIA smoke screens. by geekmux · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Geofeedia wasn't "created to impact civil liberties,"

    Yes, I'm sure you had the CIA as one of your primary customers in order for them to ensure their Christmas card distribution list was accurate. Let's keep pretending they just sell donuts for the government or some shit...

  3. Geofeedia 2.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Multiple, apparently respectable, companies, each with their own data feeds from twitter, facebook, etc. Sharing all the data with another company that does the actual spying.

    This then via highly complex technical; and legal constructs, so that the source of the 'leak' cannot be traced. Possibly even all legal, and technically not violating any agreement they may have with Twitter, Facebook, etc., but certainly setup in such a way that, if the shit does hit the fan, nobody can be held accountable.

    You know this will happen. Likely it is already happening.