The death of Freddie Gray in April 2015 while in the custody of Baltimore police touched off a wave of protests in that city about civil rights and the department’s treatment of African-Americans. Days later, as protests mounted, police monitoring social media noticed that kids from a local high school planned to skip class to join a protest at a nearby mall. The department deployed officers to intercept and turn back the students.
The summary of the surveillance comes courtesy of Geofeedia, a Chicago company that sells software that allows users, including police departments across the U.S., to track the whereabouts of people based on searches of data posted to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social networks. According to marketing materials posted by Geofeedia on its website, location-based monitoring of social media activity allowed police in Baltimore “to stay one step ahead of the rioters” and, by running social media photos through facial recognition software, “discover rioters with outstanding warrants and arrest them directly from the crowd.”
We know of the monitoring thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the information via records requests to law enforcement agencies in California. A report released Oct. 11 by the group documents how social media companies provided data about users to Geofeedia that comes directly from their servers.
Though both Facebook and Instagram later cut off the feeds, both companies provided police access to data that allowed Geofeedia to sort by specific topics, hashtag or location. Twitter, which also has since ended the practice, provide searchable access to its database of tweets.
As the ACLU noted, the social networks that supplied data for use in monitoring all have expressed publicly their support for activism and free speech.
“Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Black Lives Matter and expressed sympathy after Philando Castile’s killing, which was broadcast on Facebook Live,” Matt Cagle, an attorney for the ACLU who authored the report, wrote in a blog post. “Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey went to Ferguson. Above all, the companies articulate their role as a home for free speech about important social or political issues.”
“Social media monitoring is spreading fast and is a powerful example of surveillance technology that can disproportionately impact communities of color,” Cagle added.
For its part, Geofeedia says it has protections in place to ensure that its technology is not used to infringe civil rights.
Though data feeds from the companies have legitimate applications – investors, for example, use data sets from the companies to learn early of problems that can affect stocks, e.g., someone tweets about about his friend becoming ill after eating at Chipotle. The data also can help in finding missing persons. But giving it to the government for use in surveillance can chill the exercise of basic freedoms.
The ACLU is calling on social networks to adhere to guidelines that include a prohibition on supplying data access to developers who are providing software for government surveillance. The networks also should develop clear and open policies that bar use of data feeds for surveillance, and should monitor developers to spot violations, the ACLU says.