BlueJay, is the “Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner,” which provides real-time, geo-fenced access to every single public tweet so that local police can keep tabs on #gunfire, #meth, and #protest (yes, those are real examples) in their communities. BlueJay is the product of BrightPlanet, whose tagline is “Deep Web Intelligence” and whose board is populated with people like Admiral John Poindexter of Total Information Awareness infamy.
BlueJay allows users to enter a set of Twitter accounts, keywords, and locations to scan for within 25-mile geofences (BlueJay users can create up to five such fences), then it returns all matching tweets in real-time. If the tweets come with GPS locations, they are plotted on a map. The product can also export databases of up to 100,000 matching tweets at a time.
A look at the BlueJay interface shows it to be a fairly basic tool, but one that gets its power from full access to the Twitter “firehose” of all tweets. Users who want to search the Twitterverse have three basic options: Twitter’s search API, Twitter’s streaming API, or full firehouse access to Twitter from third party providers like GNIP and DataSift. The first two are free but limited; BrightPlanet notes that even the broader streaming API returns somewhere between one and 40 percent of the relevant tweets depending on Twitter’s load at the moment. The firehose requires some serious infrastructure and a paid contract with Twitter, but it provides all relevant tweets.
BlueJay partners with firehose providers and touts this fact in its marketing copy: “BlueJay captures tweets from the entire Twitter stream, unlike all other products on the market that only get a fraction of the tweets that are being posted.” BlueJay is meant only for local monitoring of tweets, but this also keeps the price in reach of local police departments—$150 a month.
Of course, once you have this basic data, you may want to do more with it. Say a suspect is tweeting from a GPS-enabled phone client and appears to be dealing drugs. Forget bothering with the paperwork needed to track the phone through a cell phone provider. BrightPlanet also offers GeoTime, a separate data visualization tool that can take exported BlueJay data and mine it to show where and when the target travels, what he tweets about at various locations, and where his phone resides at night. (BrightPlanet describes this as using “pattern recognition to automatically detect and annotate time-space behaviors, such as meetings, gaps, connections, clusters, and motion.)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/how-the-cops-watch-your-tweets-in-real-time/
You could be denied a loan because of your social media postings:
Lenders have begun to find a new use for this information, scrutinizing Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn data to determine the credit-worthiness of loan applicants. It’s an unprecedented practice that consumer advocates say can be unfair or discriminatory—and one that is poised to only become more prevalent in the years ahead.
Among the US-based online lenders that factor in social media to their lending decisions is San Francisco-based LendUp, which checks out the Facebook and Twitter profiles of potential borrowers to see how many friends they have and how often they interact; the company views an active social media life as an indicator of stability. The lender Neo, a Silicon Valley start-up, looks at the quality and quantity of an applicant’s LinkedIn contacts for clues to how quickly laid-off borrowers will be rehired. Moven, which is based in New York, also uses information from Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites in their loan underwriting process.
Several international lenders have been using similar tactics for a while. Lenddo, for example, which makes loans to folks in developing countries, denies credit to applicants who are Facebook friends with someone who was late repaying a Lenddo loan. Big banks have not yet jumped on board with this controversial credit-vetting method, but consumer advocates and financial industry experts sayit’s probably only a matter of time.
Companies like Neo and LendUp seized an opening in the market to provide low-income borrowers, who may lack bank accounts or have bad credit, an alternative to payday loans. Though credit-worthiness is typically based on factors like employment, finances, and whether you make your credit card payments on time, these companies argue that they are able to serve borrowers that traditional banks deem risky because they are able to evaluate credit risk based on more subtle social media-based indicators.
The problem, consumer advocates say, is that because there are few regulations governing this new way of grading borrowers’ trustworthiness, applicants can be subject to unfair and discriminatory decisions by lenders.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/lenders-vet-borrowers-social-media-facebook
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http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/09/police-can-watch-monitor-your-tweets-in.html