
You are being followed: The business of social media surveillance - danso
http://littlesis.org/news/2016/05/18/you-are-being-followed-the-business-of-social-media-surveillance/
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galfarragem
Recently I helped a friend tracking the robber of his skrill account. It's
scary the amount of info that you can get from somebody that has been slightly
sloppy. A tiny trace in google was enough to get sufficient info to lock him
up.

~~~
samstave
Need a how to on how to do this please

~~~
dexterdog
Unfortunately that will just teach them to do it better. The important thing
is that they are usually sloppy so if you are resourceful you will be able to
take care of yourself.

~~~
galfarragem
Unfortunately you are right. But the difficult part is not even getting the
info, making the police to catch the usually 'petty thief that lives abroad'
is. On small robberies burocracy will defeat you before you get your money
back.

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jim-greer
I suspect some of these companies also do surveillance on non-public social
media posts. It's about the only explanation I can think of for the volume of
friend requests I get from fake profiles of attractive women...

~~~
dexterdog
I get those as well but it's because we actually have a bunch of things in
common.

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stephengillie
I've been tracking ARK players on Steam for a few months.[0] It's remarkably
easy, as Steam servers give out their player Steam names and play duration to
anyone who asks. Connecting this to other documents isn't easy.

It depends on a PHP application but that is easy to find on Github too.[1]
I've been porting this PHP application to Powershell too, work in progress.
Next step is moving to Elastic Search for data storage.

[0][https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape](https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape)

[1][https://github.com/xPaw/PHP-Source-Query](https://github.com/xPaw/PHP-
Source-Query)

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Mendenhall
Perhaps because I was around before the net and have known people who have
done wicked things. Whenever I hear "social media" I think well thats a good
way to get stalked and killed,but thats just me.

~~~
dave2000
But nearly everyone uses social media. It's like saying you're at risk because
the phone book lists your name and address. It lists nearly everyone's name
and address. What makes you so special?

~~~
Mendenhall
The first thing I notice about your post is your made up implication that my
post speaks of me being special. That sort of rhetoric is the exact thing I
try to avoid in hacker news. My life experience has shown me how dangerous
social media can be. I choose not to put my information in social media and in
fact I cant be found in the phonebook, that is just personal preference. I
could care less what nearly everyone is doing.

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philip1209
It's being used for more than just police surveillance. Entelo watches for
your LinkedIn and other profiles to update then tells recruiters that you
might be looking for a job. [https://www.entelo.com/](https://www.entelo.com/)

~~~
exvxs
That's not really the same thing though. Surveillance is State --> Civilian,
but recruitment is Civilian --> Civilian. Different power dynamic, different
laws apply, and different consequences.

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electic
A lot of these companies do surveillance beyond social media. Welcome to the
Internet. Where everyone is tracking everything.

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tn13
BTW is there any company out there which helps individuals completely get rid
of their online presence ?

~~~
dghughes
I've thought it would be cool to make a virus that doesn't do the usual but a
specific person.

You the programmer get a request to target John K Smith you make a virus
specifically for that person. Then the virus is released where infects
anything it can and if it finds John K Smith it deletes or permanently
encrypts the info.

~~~
woodman
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. It is a fun problem to think about - you
don't want to reveal the target, but you also don't want to be detected (gotta
poison backups)... so indiscriminate destruction doesn't work.

------
golergka
Can someone explain to me, how tracking of information that people have
voluntarily provided to be public to the whole world is unethical? If you make
a public post on Instagram, you're doing it exactly for people to see.

~~~
wallacoloo
I'm not sure the article ever suggested this was unethical. I think the
biggest claim it made on this front was the following, focusing not on
potentially inappropriate access to data, but rather inappropriate _use_ of
that data:

"At its worst, social media monitoring could create classes of 'pre-criminals'
apprehended before they commit crimes if police and prosecutors are able to
argue that social media postings forecast intent. This is the predictive
business model to which Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris aspires."

And I think it's a decent concern. If somebody tries to build a profile of you
out of your social media presence, they're most likely getting a pretty
inaccurate (or biased) picture of you, which is especially concerning if they
aren't aware of the limitations of these profiles - and judging by the history
of things like polygraphs, _this is likely the case_. This potentially has
consequences for your employment/background checks, or any time your character
is called into question, in general.

~~~
golergka
OK, so the point is that assuming people are wrongdoers or can be wrongdoers
without any real evidence is wrong and anybody should be deserved not on
statistical or intuitive guesses, but instead enjoy presumption of innocence
and good intent. Sounds reasonable.

Shouldn't the same principle apply to mentioned companies and law enforcement
agencies as well then?

~~~
wallacoloo
This article _never claims_ that anyone using "social media intelligence" is
an evildoer. To be honest, I'm not sure where you've drawn this conclusion
from, as even the majority of the comments here appear to be in alignment with
the view that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the scenario we've been
presented. The article seems to be informative, more than anything else.

That being said, I think you're really misusing the "innocent until proven
guilty" idea. If a complete stranger appeared on your doorstep wielding a
steak knife and offered to help you prepare dinner in exchange for him staying
the night on your couch, would you _assume_ he was innocent, let him in, and
then not keep a watchful eye on him? _Most_ people would not, and this
suggests that, all else being equal, most people would prefer to act in ways
that don't put them at risk.

So I disagree that we should automatically assume that the intelligence
community are all innocent. Nor do I think we should assume any of them are
guilty with evidence. But I absolutely believe it's ok to watch them with
scrutiny until we understand the implications of this data being used in
investigations. Keeping a watchful eye on governments and companies encourages
accountability. That's a good thing.

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chatmasta
What's in a name? What you call "social media surveillance," others might call
"open source intelligence." Interestingly, the same people might call the same
thing by different words, depending on whether they profit from it.

For fairness, here's a blog post by Brightplanet, one of the subjects of the
OP, called "What is OSINT and how can your organization use it? [0]

Many of the same issues that came up in discussion of the recent OKCupid study
[1] apply to this piece. I liked what AnhonyMuse wrote in reply to my comment:
"people want to create a binary distinction between 'public' (meaning public
domain, can be used for anything by anyone) and 'private' (meaning something
known solely to a single individual), with no intermediary steps between
them."

This point applies especially to people's feelings on "social media
surveillance." To those most concerned about it, an easy argument exists: if
you didn't want to be surveilled, why did you post it "publicly" on the
Internet? The problem with this argument is that, as AnthonyMuse pointed out,
people have different definitions, and therefore expectations, of what is
_public_.

Personally, I think that "open source intelligence" or "social media
surveillance," or whatever you want to call it, needs to become as mainstream
as Google. Its power is only "creepy" or corruptible so long as only a few
entities can wield it. Surveillance in the hands of a few is dangerous;
surveillance in the hands of many is powerful. When everyone has the power to
spy on everybody else, then everyone must correctly calibrate their
"expectations" for what is public and what is not. If you know that some
percentage of your friends on social media are using "surveillance" tools,
then you'll be more careful about what you post, because you will understand
the true meaning of "public." Whereas if all the surveillance continues to
happen in secret, you will continue to post recklessly, blissfully unaware of
just how "public" your posts are.

We need to democratize open source intelligence in order to balance the power
between those who currently hold it and those who don't. Why should the NSA
have all the fun?

Will the "next Google" be a company that indexes the "deep web" [2] and
provides a search engine for it?

[0] [https://brightplanet.com/2013/04/what-is-osint-and-how-
can-y...](https://brightplanet.com/2013/04/what-is-osint-and-how-can-your-
organization-use-it/)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11705677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11705677)

[2] Deep web meaning pages behind paywalls or requiring registration. Not Tor.

P.S. I feel the same way about propaganda. Why should government agencies be
the only ones with the power to propagandize their message? Everyone should
have access to top-of-the-line shilling software!

~~~
thetmkay
> If you know that some percentage of your friends on social media are using
> "surveillance" tools, then you'll be more careful about what you post,
> because you will understand the true meaning of "public." Whereas if all the
> surveillance continues to happen in secret, you will continue to post
> recklessly, blissfully unaware of just how "public" your posts are.

This may help reduce the asymmetry of power, but is it not a case of "throwing
the baby out with the bath water"? We lose the exact freedom we are trying to
protect - the freedom to act so-called "recklessly" or "inappropriately" in
respect to popular opinion.

~~~
notduncansmith
Information really wants to be free.

Privacy is only necessary now because when you lose it, when someone else
holds such a detailed profile of your behavior, there's a deep power
imbalance. If you received a similarly detailed profile on everyone who was
privy to yours, it wouldn't be so bad - and that's exactly what GP proposed.

I think there's something deeply immoral about asking someone to ignore, for
your sake, some physical phenomenon that's occurring as much in their universe
as yours.

~~~
dredmorbius
There are two parts of this I disgree with.

1\. It's not _information_ that wants to be free, but _access_ to _published_
information. Where the roots of the word "publish" in "public" are germane. In
addition to _published_ information, information on _public_ institutions such
as governments, government agencies, bureaucracies, major social actors, the
wealthy (who've gained strongly through socially-mediated systems), and those
guilty of crimes against society.

2\. Information doesn't _balance_ power imbalances, it _magnifies_ them.
Though the empowered and disempowered have different vulnerabilities and
strengths. Hence information can work against the empowered and disempowered
in different ways.

Absent a _handle_ or _pivot point_ for power, information yields none. You
simply have understanding of a process you cannot manipulate.

------
soared
There is nothing like a social media surveillance post to bring all the
paranoid, dated commenters out of the woodwork. If you are online, you are
being tracked. There should be no question about that. Whether its your ISP,
analytics, Facebook, google, government, or any other website you use, someone
is recording your behavior and making political/business/misc decisions based
on it.

You can turn off JS, use tor/vpn, adblock, etc, but we've seen time and time
again that there are ways around each one of those strategies. I'm not saying
this is ethical or correct, but it is happening and you can't really stop it.

I think its ethical and don't mind. If you post something with a username
attached, its traceable and you should understand that. 99.9% of collection is
anonymized and used to create better products, offer free* services, improve
the internet, etc.

~~~
MasterScrat
> 99.9% of collection is anonymized and used to create better products, offer
> free* services, improve the internet, etc.

[citation needed]

