In January 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation made an open request to "industry" for a "social media alert, mapping, and analysis application" with the "flexibility to change search parameters and geo-locate the search based on breaking events or emerging threats." They wanted an app, in other words, that would allow keyword searches — for gunfire, for meth, for protests, for killings — in specific areas to locate bad guys and potential bad guys. They wanted a social media scraper. They wanted covert access to your tweets, your status updates, your Instagrammed photos. They wanted your YouTube comments and comments on websites made through Facebook. They wanted all of them, and more. This FBI request, along with similar desires among police outside the federal government, has since given birth to a cluster of companies that hope to capitalize.
With names like BlueJay, SnapTrends, and even the multibillion-dollar public-records database company LexisNexis, these companies claim to offer an unprecedented tool to police officers — a definitive, easy-to-use product that can keep police informed when people publicly announce crimes or potential crimes on the web.
This may sound like a potential violation of civil rights and freedoms. But analytics experts — who have used big data to predict how we shop and how we vote and what we look for on the web — bring up another point: scouring social media may not be useful to predict crimes. It may, in fact, be the opposite — an expensively wild goose chase, an endless search for a needle. It may lead to fruitless searches and false arrests. And if they’re right, these companies, these police departments, and the FBI may be scouring the web for something that isn’t there — a simple way to locate criminals on social media.
Source : The Verge
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