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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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/
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.
I used to do that to know when [company]'s top customers were talking with competitors. It's funny how often "private" discussions turn into a LinkedIn request..
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.
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.
There are certainly companies & methods, but "getting rid of social presence" is more of solution than an end, so it depends on what you are actually trying to accomplish.
you actually have the wrong idea then. You would want to in fact, increase your media presence 10-20x. Paying people to maintain false accounts with various real & fake pictures of yourself claiming residence in places you have lived or traveled. These large active social media accounts will provide a haystack buffer for your real account which you will gradually provatize and hide.
Generally what you are asking for is not currently possible. You can make requests of search engines to not show links, you can send DMCA takedown requests to places that have photos, and you can plead with forum mods to delete your posts. You can ask the Internet Archive to delete pages about you.
But none of that protects you when some kid who made a copy of things and posts them again and again on some random forum site like one of the chan sites or some other home grown forum. Eventually it will be indexed again and you'll be back trying to whack it out of existence. Sorry.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
[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!
>> 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!
The US government after WWII was wondering how to avoid a situation in their own country that lead up to the holocaust. They studied Sigmund Freud to learn how to "manipulate" the crowds into "being happy" or create the illusion of happiness with distraction or consumerism. Freud's uncle, (Hugo Bernaise[1]) enjoyed massive influence among political circles and and gave them and corporations advise[2] on manipulating and controlling the masses.
There is an excellent BBC mini series (also available on youtube) called "The century of the self" ... The episode that talks specifically about Freud and Bernaise is called "Engineering Consent".
The documentary may seem slightly dated but in light of recent geopolitical developments and our discussion about government and corporate surveillance it's worth every minute!
> 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.
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.
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.
I agree; but the value in these tools is very transient based on cat-and-mouse.
For precisely this reason they become useless when open-sourced.
And on the other hand it's not like they're great works of art. They're weekend hacks driving a rest API or phantomjs. Most of the "art" is threading or concurrency and getting it all to go over a 4K line "free proxy" list without falling over too badly.
Want 10k Twitter accounts? It's not magic. It's just some dumb scripts and a bit of patience.
You don't need massive server power (a $5 droplet will do fine) but you do have to have a bunch of time to waste.
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.
