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Citing privacy concerns, BPD cancels plans to buy software to monitor social media for now
By adamg on Fri, 01/13/2017 - 8:00pm
Boston Police Commissioner William Evans announced tonight that he has canceled plans to buy software that would let the department monitor social media for potential public-safety threats and ferret out Internet-based crimes because the offerings the department was considering are overkill and raised privacy issues.
Moving forward, we will continue the process of inspecting what is available and ensuring that it meets the needs of the department while protecting the privacy of the public.
Evans said he will work with City Councilor Andrea Campbell (Dorchester), who chairs the council's public-safety committee, on hearings to better gauge public concerns and help draft a proposal for social-media monitoring that would protect both the public and the privacy rights of citizens.
At the same time, he instructed the Boston Regional Intelligence Center - the department's intelligence unit - to "consider re-drafting the request for proposals to ensure that the Department acquires the appropriate level of technology, while also protecting the privacy of the public."
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Comments
What kind of software
were they looking at?! Anything a typical corporation would use wouldn't lead to any privacy issues, it would just filter and sort publicly available information. Hell, a free Hootsuite account would probably do a lot of what they want.
They should really consider bringing a social person in for this.
Click on the "announced" link
At the bottom of that, you'll find links to the specific bids they were looking at. It was more than just browsing Twitter - BPD already does that (they responded pretty quickly when I posted some stat Tito Jackson threw out about shootings the other day) . This would be taking in feeds from the various social-media networks and using software to monitor every single message in real-time for particular keywords and phrases, in a particular geographic area.
Dataminr, the company that seemed to get the most attention when this whole thing came up, for example, promised a 'situational awareness software platform" that, for $1.4 million, would hopefully be a lot more sophisticated than just setting up a bunch of columns in TweetDeck. For example, the company says it could alert BPD of new potential threats as they pop up based on its algorithms built out of something like five years worth of tweets.
Many other options.
I have a deep background in social and know there's obviously a lot more to this application that Tweetdeck, Hooutsuite, etc. Not actually suggesting it would be enough as much as making a comparative statement.
That said, there are a lot of advanced platforms out there that can do what they want for way less than millions and without the shady "GeoTime’s unique 3D timespace allows users to quickly identify patterns of a target’s life. Correlating daily patterns between two distinct locations may reveal the target’s home and work addresses" stuff. Crimson Hexagon, for example, can monitor keywords, phrases, and even individual accounts. It also has geolocation options, and sentiment analysis options that can assign positive/negative and various emotions (though it is still in beta) to a post, which can be custom trained. When you start getting into privacy and civil liberties and whatnot, that becomes more of a concern for what is done after the data is received, interpreted, and acted on. It's also not wise to completely rely on an alert system over actively monitoring feeds.
It seems like they're in a bit over their heads with it in my opinion, especially if they're taking a "come to us" approach (I admittedly don't know if they're required to do this or if they can do they're own research), and why they should be bringing in a social media/communications professional to work with them on this.
The RAINbyte Daily. Records and Archives in the News
The RAINbyte Daily
Records and Archives in the News
http://paper.li/RAINbyte/rainbyte?edition_id=a76d23f0-d7bc-11e6-8c0f-0cc...
Records Management Guidelines, Laws, Regulations...
In Massachusetts any a) records management guidelines, b) laws, c) regulations, d) etc. that might help you get some access to read a bit of your own records at a charity or at a corporation you've been a client of if it's a nonprofit organization that may or may not include some health records as well as your other client records?
On the other hand it's a question re e) What are considered best practices for clients' privacy/clients' access to their own records at nonprofits?
Bombs Away!
Few of us might not think much of the subject line but I just guaranteed that UHUB will have this thread closely monitored.
For a number fo years I have managed a mailing list of about 200 people for a friend engaged in a specific political topic and maybe 1-2 times a year he would have an action alert to post out, which I would do for him given I had the software set up.
I often let him know that the message was successfully delivered, accounting for mail list bounces, but sending him am e-mail entitled "Bombs Away!" thinking little of it.
It later occurred to me that the NSA would likely pick off that message and put me and my associate on a watch list. We have to consider that is already the case.
That said buy saying NSA and bomb a few times in this thread I am certain NSA is reading this.
Hi guys!