Company sold Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds to US police
Geofeedia, an analytics company that provides insight into data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on a map and can also filter it, sold its data to various American police forces. For example, the data was used in the controversial 2014 Ferguson protests.
The American Civil Liberties Union exposes this use of the data on its website. The documents the ACLU is showing have been made public at its own request. The protests in Ferguson are part of a wider debate about racial discrimination by police in the US, militarization of police forces and the unjust use of force by law enforcement. In an email, a Geofeedia employee says that the Geofeedia service has been monitoring those protests ‘with great success’.
The company had agreements with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and received a feed of public posts from all three. This data was not only associated with the tagged location, but also the location of the upload. This made it possible to filter by location, date and hashtag in Geofeedia, making local surveillance on social media very easy. According to internal emails, social media posts were already visible in Geofeedia after 15 to 20 minutes.
The ACLU addresses the contradiction of providing the data to Geofeedia. Social media values freedom of expression and freedom of action. This would be apparent from statements of support for movements such as Black Lives Matter by leaders of Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, police forces use their data via Geofeedia to keep a close eye on those same protesters and to nip their actions in the bud.
While Facebook and Instagram do not have policies prohibiting the use of data for surveillance purposes, according to the ACLU, Twitter does. The company has therefore sent a cease & desist letter to Geofeedia. At the time of writing the ACLU, the service still had access to the data from Twitter, but in the meantime not anymore. The company stopped the information flows from Facebook subsidiary Instagram and Facebook itself on September 19. The ACLU is calling on social media to never again make their data available for surveillance purposes, to set clear regulations and conditions for this, and to keep a closer eye on developers with access to the data.
Geofeedia responds to its website by stating that it considers matters such as privacy and freedom of paramount importance and that its services to police forces are done precisely with a view to protecting those rights and freedoms. It would be against Geofeedia’s policy to use the software for ethnic profiling, as would have been done in Ferguson. The company says it will work to prevent this misuse of the data and wants to sit down with the ACLU.
Geofeedia does not publish a list of clients on its website, but an article linked by Geofeedia shows that the service is also used in Europe.