I suppose it depends how deep the rabbit hole goes.
I am guessing that it started with random HR woman who looks up a candidates Facebook profile and sees loads of drinking images (cf Danish Prime Minister)
But turn that into a small company that just looks for drinking references for New Yorkers at a certain age and can correlate to "unsafe drinking behaviour" - now the corporate background checks that once were just criminal record checks and university attendance can add a "gold" service - they are just getting a rating from a cottage industry provider now - but it's the same idea - count number of photos with a cocktail in hand.
I am just putting it out there - it's just there are so many options.
To a large extent monitoring and aggregating out behaviour is what "social media" advertising is - but the same thing is likely to find other commercial uses as well as the big fundamental society changing effect of all of us being able to monitor our behaviour - and do so in medical context - your behaviour monitored in the best interests of the patient.
Compare with SIGINT, HUMINT, MASINT and other intelligence sources. I believe it’s military/intelligence terminology but you see it in security jargon too.
Sure, but as someone who reads a ton of history books with other *INT terms this is the first I'm learning of this one, and there are plenty of people who have less context than me.
I got intrigued by OSINT near the beginning of the Ukraine war. I imagine a lot of community members have related background experience. But interesting to think of those without experience that got into it and can have an impact with the tools available.
There's a good podcast called New Models where they interview someone from the OSINT community. Recommend this if it piques your interest.
Is this more than an odd UI over what amounts to one of those GitHub "awesome" lists of links? I drilled down on a few categories and it seems like it's just that, but... slower to use.
you may be doing manually because most information out there is not as digested as we'd hope it to be, but if you eventually scrape your sources, your life would be infinitely easier and your work much more powerful. The NSA was doing some "OSINT" not too long ago... imagine if you scrape Instagram, facebook, linkedin, maps, etc.
I don't really understand the Venn Diagram here with journalism, spying and democratic debate, but it's there.
A cottage industry that I assume will explode into things like
- Hiring background checks
- consumer credit and counter party analysis
- supply chain somethings (the old how many trucks left that depot last month tells you something valuable)
Any other ideas ? Companies already springing up to do this?