You are being followed: The business of social media surveillance
What's in a name? What you call "social media surveillance," others might call "open source intelligence." Interestingly, the same people might call the same thing by different words, depending on whether they profit from it.<p>For fairness, here's a blog post by Brightplanet, one of the subjects of the OP, called "What is OSINT and how can your organization use it? [0]<p>Many of the same issues that came up in discussion of the recent OKCupid study [1] apply to this piece. I liked what AnhonyMuse wrote in reply to my comment: "people want to create a binary distinction between 'public' (meaning public domain, can be used for anything by anyone) and 'private' (meaning something known solely to a single individual), with no intermediary steps between them."<p>This point applies especially to people's feelings on "social media surveillance." To those most concerned about it, an easy argument exists: if you didn't want to be surveilled, why did you post it "publicly" on the Internet? The problem with this argument is that, as AnthonyMuse pointed out, people have different definitions, and therefore expectations, of what is <i>public</i>.<p>Personally, I think that "open source intelligence" or "social media surveillance," or whatever you want to call it, needs to become as mainstream as Google. Its power is only "creepy" or corruptible so long as only a few entities can wield it. Surveillance in the hands of a few is dangerous; surveillance in the hands of many is powerful. When everyone has the power to spy on everybody else, then everyone must correctly calibrate their "expectations" for what is public and what is not. If you know that some percentage of your friends on social media are using "surveillance" tools, then you'll be more careful about what you post, because you will understand the true meaning of "public." Whereas if all the surveillance continues to happen in secret, you will continue to post recklessly, blissfully unaware of just how "public" your posts are.<p>We need to democratize open source intelligence in order to balance the power between those who currently hold it and those who don't. Why should the NSA have all the fun?<p>Will the "next Google" be a company that indexes the "deep web" [2] and provides a search engine for it?<p>[0] <a href="https://brightplanet.com/2013/04/what-is-osint-and-how-can-your-organization-use-it/" rel="nofollow">https://brightplanet.com/2013/04/what-is-osint-and-how-can-y...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11705677" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11705677</a><p>[2] Deep web meaning pages behind paywalls or requiring registration. Not Tor.<p>P.S. I feel the same way about propaganda. Why should government agencies be the only ones with the power to propagandize their message? Everyone should have access to top-of-the-line shilling software!