8 ms·

US startup Geofeedia 'allowed police to track protesters'

136 points by xufi 10y ago

TearsInTheRain 10y ago
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.
- CoryG89 10y ago
  I would be willing to bet that at least someone at Facebook and Twitter knew that this data was being sold to them and knew they were likely to use it for this purpose. Although this data is all "public", it is still not convenient or in-line with their terms of service to access it en-masse, and in real time, for these types of purposes without an explicit agreement with them. Personally, I would think that Facebook and Twitter only cancelled the contract with Geofeedia because the ACLU called them out so publicly.
wheaties 10y ago
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.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  I doubt they'll actually have a choice in limiting it, but I expect they'll pretend like it's not happening either by force or because, like you said, it's not in their best interest to make people aware of it. People just need to learn not to trust anyone. It's the only path to happy life.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
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.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  If only there was some way to not voluntarily post all one's personal data and activities online.
  - throwawayReply 10y ago
    Much of it isn't voluntary. People are sold a phone to which they provide some details including social media logins and install some apps. They then carry their phone around with them not realizing that the phone is automatically uploading it's location to various services. If you were to poll people, "Does having Facebook installed imply your location will be broadcast to Facebook 24/7?", I think you might be surprised to find out that even despite that leading question that people in fact don't realize that. To use an adroid phone requires a google account to which your location will be transmitted. You can ask google to stop this happening but then you're back to the issue that people need to be aware this is even happening. In tech circles people are well educated about this particular issue. More widely this is less well known.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      Yea--I would love to live in a world where we aren't all forced to have "social media logins" in the first place!
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      Much of it is. Facebook claims that the data Geofeedia was accessing was publicly shared, as in, not related to the location pings used by the service to find nearby friends. That means pictures and posts with GPS data attached (read: willfully created by the user), unless there's some kind of proof that this company had a level of API access that goes beyond the level any other developer can access. People oversharing is a huge problem.
mason240 10y ago
It seems reasonable at time when "protesting" means shutting down infrastructure.
- fweespeech 10y ago
  > It seems reasonable at time when "protesting" means shutting down infrastructure. --- > It seems reasonable at time when "legislating" means shutting down infrastructure. I'm curious why you complain about one and not the other? The latter is being used to take away people's access to things like voting, etc. by shutting down polling locations, changing times, etc. to reduce access to people who vote for the "wrong" party.
- crazypyro 10y ago
  There is a long history of blocking crucial infrastructure during civil unrest and protesting. Its used as a tactic because its effective. Nothing about it is new or specific to today's society. How does that justify potentially infringing upon the protected rights of the protestors?
  - mason240 10y ago
    > Its used as a tactic because its effective. So are armed mobs that murder political opponents. Might does not equal right. People have a right to protest. They don't have a right to destroy property that doesn't belong them. They don't have the right to circumvent democracy and infringing upon the rights of everyone else by shutting down infrastructure that belongs to the all people.
    - vkou 10y ago
      De-facto, might almost certainly means right. Most protests happen because the government uses physical force, or the threat of physical force to infringe upon the rights of its constituents.
    - CoryG89 10y ago
      I agree that protestors have no right to destroy property that doesn't belong to them. I don't agree that the police should be expected to confront protestors just because they shut down an interstate. You have no basic human right to not be inconvenienced at all by non-violent protestors. Non-violent protests that happen to shut down an interstate at some point should not be met with riot shields and swat teams.
omouse 10y ago
I've always found it curious why no one sets up a class-action lawsuit about the privacy and 3rd party selling of data.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  In the US, you are free to collect any data you can observe (assuming you don't interfere with others' rights). You are also free to trade what you collect with others. On what basis could someone bring a class-action lawsuit about sales of data that was lawfully collected by a third-party?
  - surfmike 10y ago
    Well, the argument would be that it wasn't within the lawful allowed use.
    - mc32 10y ago
      You mean breach of contract which could be a tort, but not a "crime". Unless a given state has local laws which have provisions against that... Where advertisers would also fall under... Unless they lobbied for a provision exempting them... To make FB et al viable as an advertising platform. Social networks are double edged swords by their nature.
    - imaginenore 10y ago
      The collection of the data is illegal for the government, not the use of it. The laws need to be updated.
niftich 10y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12688548 [2] http://blog.geofeedia.com/a-commitment-to-freedom-of-speech-and-civil-liberties http://blog.geofeedia.com/a-commitment-to-freedom-of-speech-...
- CoryG89 10y ago
  Thanks. I read the Ars article yesterday, but hadn't seen the response from Geofeedia. I don't really buy that they have adequate safeguards against the police using this data inappropriately. Seems like a bold claim to me and requires further explanation. In the Ars story, they allege that as many as 500 different police departments across the country are using their data.
danso 10y ago
MuckRock has written about this and has published their public records requests: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/may/18/followed/ 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.
Paul-ish 10y ago
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.
- etherealmachine 10y ago
  I'll bite. > Why is it bad for a government to aggregate public data? In the past, this has been problematic. There are several examples of government agencies using their authority to suppress political dissent. The Stasi in Germany, the KGB, Hoover's FBI. True, they had private data as well, but the problem wasn't the source of the data - it was that they used it for political suppression. It's clear that the agencies involved with Geofeedia would prefer the protesters just "go away" - they have no incentive to be supportive of their goals. Given the power imbalance and incentive misalignment, gathering information on them has an inherent smell to it, just from past experience.
  - weberc2 10y ago
    While I can appreciate the slippery-slope argument against mass surveillance and bulk data collection, comparing municipal police with infamous clandestine federal investigative agencies borders on conspiracy theory. While I don't doubt that the police dislike like the criticism, it seems more likely that their strongest incentive is to keep the peace (specifically preventing the destruction, theft, assault, and murder that characterize so many of these "protests").
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - whybroke 10y ago
      No doubt the vast majority of police departments have good intentions. But when the group protesting police malfeasance is then monitored by those same police in order to keep what those police consider to be the peace over them. And then they must rely on those same police not to target individual participants after the protest for retaliation, then that monitoring is obviously a very serious problem if the protesters be correct.
Twirrim 10y ago
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.
- slucidi 10y ago
  Geotagging is something that tends to be on by default, and lots of people aren't aware they can shut it off. (or that it's happening in the first place)
  - tajen 10y ago
    The Twitter app properly communicates when you're geotagging your tweets or not, and allows deactivation using a simple click before you submit. If that's all it takes for privacy, then I'm ok with this. Facebook is much more sneaky. I would be curious to know how many protesters shared their location without wanting to. Witnessing my family of tech-unaware people, privacy leaks is a monster they're all afraid of, thanks to headlines of media, and they often ask "Not to be tagged on fb" or "How can I be sure that ...". Protesters are probably even more conscious of this.
    - netik 10y ago
      Defaults are strong and powerful, though. This is the main issue which companies like this have taken advantage of. Many users don't know that something is on by default, and if the default is to geotag, people will nearly always forget to disable the geotagging. You or I might know what it means when the 'place' icon is highlighted during a tweet. Non technical users might not understand the implication of thier actions.
- aeze 10y ago
  Only something like 2% of posts have geolocation enabled, though services like Geofeedia also try to discern your location through other means (eg. mentioning you're at a particular area/place).
mwfunk 10y ago
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.
- ep103 10y ago
  Because in practice, cops use this sort of data to lock down protest sites, before the protests ever actually happen. People start attempting to congregate in a given area, and are immediately escorted out by police. That forces protest movements to organize more and more potential protest sites, and have more and more logistical organization to gather people into same location. It becomes an escalation of logistical requirements to even get people organized enough _to_ protest. When you add in the fact that police are also using social network monitoring (and I mean that not just in the online term of social network websites, but as in social network monitoring overall), and regularly use face recognition at protest events (I'm speaking mostly about nypd here), and what you're left with is the bitter truth that if the NYPD truly doesn't want you to have a protest, you're not going to be able to do it. The sites you try to go to will be locked down before people arrive. The people you send to help route people to impromptu backup collections will be arrested on first sight. etc, etc, etc. Sure, is this all wildly illegal and unconstitutional behavior on the part of the police? Absolutely. But anyone who has ever worked for any politicized cause knows that its also par de course. New York, Chicago, and Oakland are famous for a break-the-law-now, pay the fines later type of police enforcement, but I've watched cops plow SUVs through 50 person hippie protest marches, light their own cars on fire, or attack protestors with knives and chainsaws (seriously, chainsaws) in more places than I care to admit, just so tomorrow's papers can say "Peaceful protest goes violent", and anyone who sells this sort of data to the police is aware that that's the reality on the ground. When the governor says jump, the police always do, regardless of legality, and this type of info just makes them that much more effective.
alexandercrohde 10y ago
Good thing this didn't exist in 1776, otherwise I'd be writing this from the British empire.

136 points by xufi 10y ago

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.

CoryG89 10y ago
I would be willing to bet that at least someone at Facebook and Twitter knew that this data was being sold to them and knew they were likely to use it for this purpose. Although this data is all "public", it is still not convenient or in-line with their terms of service to access it en-masse, and in real time, for these types of purposes without an explicit agreement with them. Personally, I would think that Facebook and Twitter only cancelled the contract with Geofeedia because the ACLU called them out so publicly.

wheaties 10y ago

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.

jasonkostempski 10y ago
I doubt they'll actually have a choice in limiting it, but I expect they'll pretend like it's not happening either by force or because, like you said, it's not in their best interest to make people aware of it. People just need to learn not to trust anyone. It's the only path to happy life.

HillaryBriss 10y ago

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.

ryandrake 10y ago
If only there was some way to not voluntarily post all one's personal data and activities online.
- throwawayReply 10y ago
  Much of it isn't voluntary. People are sold a phone to which they provide some details including social media logins and install some apps. They then carry their phone around with them not realizing that the phone is automatically uploading it's location to various services. If you were to poll people, "Does having Facebook installed imply your location will be broadcast to Facebook 24/7?", I think you might be surprised to find out that even despite that leading question that people in fact don't realize that. To use an adroid phone requires a google account to which your location will be transmitted. You can ask google to stop this happening but then you're back to the issue that people need to be aware this is even happening. In tech circles people are well educated about this particular issue. More widely this is less well known.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Yea--I would love to live in a world where we aren't all forced to have "social media logins" in the first place!
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    Much of it is. Facebook claims that the data Geofeedia was accessing was publicly shared, as in, not related to the location pings used by the service to find nearby friends. That means pictures and posts with GPS data attached (read: willfully created by the user), unless there's some kind of proof that this company had a level of API access that goes beyond the level any other developer can access. People oversharing is a huge problem.

mason240 10y ago

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

fweespeech 10y ago
> It seems reasonable at time when "protesting" means shutting down infrastructure. --- > It seems reasonable at time when "legislating" means shutting down infrastructure. I'm curious why you complain about one and not the other? The latter is being used to take away people's access to things like voting, etc. by shutting down polling locations, changing times, etc. to reduce access to people who vote for the "wrong" party.
crazypyro 10y ago
There is a long history of blocking crucial infrastructure during civil unrest and protesting. Its used as a tactic because its effective. Nothing about it is new or specific to today's society. How does that justify potentially infringing upon the protected rights of the protestors?
- mason240 10y ago
  > Its used as a tactic because its effective. So are armed mobs that murder political opponents. Might does not equal right. People have a right to protest. They don't have a right to destroy property that doesn't belong them. They don't have the right to circumvent democracy and infringing upon the rights of everyone else by shutting down infrastructure that belongs to the all people.
  - vkou 10y ago
    De-facto, might almost certainly means right. Most protests happen because the government uses physical force, or the threat of physical force to infringe upon the rights of its constituents.
  - CoryG89 10y ago
    I agree that protestors have no right to destroy property that doesn't belong to them. I don't agree that the police should be expected to confront protestors just because they shut down an interstate. You have no basic human right to not be inconvenienced at all by non-violent protestors. Non-violent protests that happen to shut down an interstate at some point should not be met with riot shields and swat teams.

omouse 10y ago

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

jsprogrammer 10y ago
In the US, you are free to collect any data you can observe (assuming you don't interfere with others' rights). You are also free to trade what you collect with others. On what basis could someone bring a class-action lawsuit about sales of data that was lawfully collected by a third-party?
- surfmike 10y ago
  Well, the argument would be that it wasn't within the lawful allowed use.
  - mc32 10y ago
    You mean breach of contract which could be a tort, but not a "crime". Unless a given state has local laws which have provisions against that... Where advertisers would also fall under... Unless they lobbied for a provision exempting them... To make FB et al viable as an advertising platform. Social networks are double edged swords by their nature.
  - imaginenore 10y ago
    The collection of the data is illegal for the government, not the use of it. The laws need to be updated.

niftich 10y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12688548 [2] http://blog.geofeedia.com/a-commitment-to-freedom-of-speech-and-civil-liberties http://blog.geofeedia.com/a-commitment-to-freedom-of-speech-...

CoryG89 10y ago
Thanks. I read the Ars article yesterday, but hadn't seen the response from Geofeedia. I don't really buy that they have adequate safeguards against the police using this data inappropriately. Seems like a bold claim to me and requires further explanation. In the Ars story, they allege that as many as 500 different police departments across the country are using their data.

danso 10y ago

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

Paul-ish 10y ago

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.

etherealmachine 10y ago
I'll bite. > Why is it bad for a government to aggregate public data? In the past, this has been problematic. There are several examples of government agencies using their authority to suppress political dissent. The Stasi in Germany, the KGB, Hoover's FBI. True, they had private data as well, but the problem wasn't the source of the data - it was that they used it for political suppression. It's clear that the agencies involved with Geofeedia would prefer the protesters just "go away" - they have no incentive to be supportive of their goals. Given the power imbalance and incentive misalignment, gathering information on them has an inherent smell to it, just from past experience.
- weberc2 10y ago
  While I can appreciate the slippery-slope argument against mass surveillance and bulk data collection, comparing municipal police with infamous clandestine federal investigative agencies borders on conspiracy theory. While I don't doubt that the police dislike like the criticism, it seems more likely that their strongest incentive is to keep the peace (specifically preventing the destruction, theft, assault, and murder that characterize so many of these "protests").
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - whybroke 10y ago
    No doubt the vast majority of police departments have good intentions. But when the group protesting police malfeasance is then monitored by those same police in order to keep what those police consider to be the peace over them. And then they must rely on those same police not to target individual participants after the protest for retaliation, then that monitoring is obviously a very serious problem if the protesters be correct.

Twirrim 10y ago

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.

slucidi 10y ago
Geotagging is something that tends to be on by default, and lots of people aren't aware they can shut it off. (or that it's happening in the first place)
- tajen 10y ago
  The Twitter app properly communicates when you're geotagging your tweets or not, and allows deactivation using a simple click before you submit. If that's all it takes for privacy, then I'm ok with this. Facebook is much more sneaky. I would be curious to know how many protesters shared their location without wanting to. Witnessing my family of tech-unaware people, privacy leaks is a monster they're all afraid of, thanks to headlines of media, and they often ask "Not to be tagged on fb" or "How can I be sure that ...". Protesters are probably even more conscious of this.
  - netik 10y ago
    Defaults are strong and powerful, though. This is the main issue which companies like this have taken advantage of. Many users don't know that something is on by default, and if the default is to geotag, people will nearly always forget to disable the geotagging. You or I might know what it means when the 'place' icon is highlighted during a tweet. Non technical users might not understand the implication of thier actions.
aeze 10y ago
Only something like 2% of posts have geolocation enabled, though services like Geofeedia also try to discern your location through other means (eg. mentioning you're at a particular area/place).

mwfunk 10y ago

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.

ep103 10y ago
Because in practice, cops use this sort of data to lock down protest sites, before the protests ever actually happen. People start attempting to congregate in a given area, and are immediately escorted out by police. That forces protest movements to organize more and more potential protest sites, and have more and more logistical organization to gather people into same location. It becomes an escalation of logistical requirements to even get people organized enough _to_ protest. When you add in the fact that police are also using social network monitoring (and I mean that not just in the online term of social network websites, but as in social network monitoring overall), and regularly use face recognition at protest events (I'm speaking mostly about nypd here), and what you're left with is the bitter truth that if the NYPD truly doesn't want you to have a protest, you're not going to be able to do it. The sites you try to go to will be locked down before people arrive. The people you send to help route people to impromptu backup collections will be arrested on first sight. etc, etc, etc. Sure, is this all wildly illegal and unconstitutional behavior on the part of the police? Absolutely. But anyone who has ever worked for any politicized cause knows that its also par de course. New York, Chicago, and Oakland are famous for a break-the-law-now, pay the fines later type of police enforcement, but I've watched cops plow SUVs through 50 person hippie protest marches, light their own cars on fire, or attack protestors with knives and chainsaws (seriously, chainsaws) in more places than I care to admit, just so tomorrow's papers can say "Peaceful protest goes violent", and anyone who sells this sort of data to the police is aware that that's the reality on the ground. When the governor says jump, the police always do, regardless of legality, and this type of info just makes them that much more effective.

alexandercrohde 10y ago

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