from Hacker News

US startup Geofeedia 'allowed police to track protesters'

by xufi on 10/12/16, 3:28 PM with 72 comments

• by Paul-ish on 10/12/16, 5:15 PM

  What is special about these feeds? The Facebook data was only publicly available data; ie stuff I could get by going to the right page in by browser. Was it the same with twitter? Why is it bad for a government to aggregate public data? Not just public data, but messages I assume the writers intend to be broadcast to the world. Were not talking about private emails or messages here.

  I'm not trying to defend what is happening in a lot of areas with the police, I am just genuinely curious about the nature and potential for impact of these feeds.

• by niftich on 10/12/16, 4:35 PM

  If you're interested, a very similar article, from Ars Technica, was posted yesterday. We had a discussion on it at [1].

  Geofeedia has since posted a response [2].

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12688548

  [2] http://blog.geofeedia.com/a-commitment-to-freedom-of-speech-...

• by mwfunk on 10/12/16, 7:14 PM

  Based on this article at least, this doesn't sound like a big deal? It sounds like the service helped police discover when and where protests were happening. If bad cops used that information to illegally interfere with those protests (or the protesters themselves), that's obviously a bad thing, but that wasn't stated in the article.

  I would expect good cops to also want that same information as part of doing their jobs. Protesting isn't illegal, but if a large group of people are legally gathering someplace to vent anger about something (anything really, it doesn't even have to be a political flashpoint), I would expect police would want to know about that too, for non-sinister reasons (like general awareness WRT potentially disruptive events happening in their city that day). To police who are just doing their (non-evil) jobs, protests are important to know about for the same reasons that it's important for them to know about any other potential sources of civic chaos that day (concerts, etc.).

  It feels like the article presents the facts with an unstated assumption of "bad cops using intel for nefarious purposes", but if that's true, there wasn't any supporting evidence presented in the article.

• by danso on 10/12/16, 4:43 PM

  MuckRock has written about this and has published their public records requests: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/may/18/followed/

  I don't know what offended me more, that Geofeedias work was so laughably amateur, or that they got paid so much for it. Good for the social media companies to shut them out, even if just to save face.

• by Twirrim on 10/12/16, 5:24 PM

  Unless I'm missing something, and I may be, this is relying on the geotagging information you include in tweets, something you can control. I'm not sure I see much advantage in having your location broadcast every time you tweet.

• by wheaties on 10/12/16, 3:59 PM

  I'm certain in the future that companies that sell third-party data to the government for this type of thing will get limited by large social networks due less to the reputational risk but more to the fear that the knowledge people are being watched will cause them to change or even limit their behavior on the platform. To wit, it behooves Facebook to ensure that the majority of two individuals' social media interactions are captured via platforms they control. Any threat to that is a direct threat to their profit center, ads.

• by HillaryBriss on 10/12/16, 4:13 PM

  in any case, it's probably best to assume police and other government agencies can access your social network data.

  the ACLU may well win a million court cases, but the data is out there.

  i don't see an effective way to stop police, as individuals, or as small independently organized groups, from accessing this sort of data, whether legally or illegally. someone will find a way to get that information to the police if the police want it.

• by TearsInTheRain on 10/12/16, 3:55 PM

  I would be curious to know whether Facebook, Twitter and Instagram knew Geofeedia was selling the data to the police and in general how much they regulate third parties that access their data.

• by omouse on 10/12/16, 4:20 PM

  I've always found it curious why no one sets up a class-action lawsuit about the privacy and 3rd party selling of data.

• by alexandercrohde on 10/13/16, 3:30 AM

  Good thing this didn't exist in 1776, otherwise I'd be writing this from the British empire.

• by mason240 on 10/12/16, 4:14 PM

  It seems reasonable at time when "protesting" means shutting down infrastructure.