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Since 2016, civil freedom groups they have set off alarms about online surveillance municipal officials and police departments on social media chat. Services like Media Sonar, Social Sentinel and Geofeedia analyze online conversations, with police and city leaders explaining what hundreds of thousands of users are saying online.
Zencity, an Israeli data analysis firm that serves 200 U.S. agencies, markets itself as a less invasive alternative because it only provides aggregate data and prohibits direct surveillance of protests. Cities like Phoenix, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh say they use the service to address misinformation and measure people’s reaction to issues like social distance enforcement or traffic laws.
Speaking to WIRED, CEO Eyal Feder-Levy describes integrated service privacy protections, such as drafting personal information as a new approach to community engagement. However, local officials who use Zencity describe a number of potential and worrying uses for the tool, which some cities use without a public approval process, often through free trials.
Brandon Talsma, a county supervisor in Jasper County, Iowa, described the 72-hour live show last September, which began with a warning from Zencity. His office has been using the tool for a few months now that Zencity analysts have noticed a sudden rise in social media chats about Jasper County after reporting the brutal murder.
A 44-year-old black man living in the city of Grinnell, 92 percent white, was found dead in a ditch, his body wrapped in blankets and lit. The first news settled on the harsh details, and rumors spread that Grinnell’s residents had lynched the man.
“We are a small region; we have very limited assets and resources, “Talsma said.” He had a recipe for becoming very ugly. “
Zencity has stated that almost no online chat has been created in Iowa. Talsma’s team feared the rumors might have snowballed into the kind of misinformation it causes violence. Talsma said the team did not consider race optics until Zencity warned of the discussion online.
Police said the murder had no motive and the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP president called a press conference Betty Andrews he supported this discovery. Since then the police have identified and filed a complaint four suspects, three white men and one white woman, linked to the case.
Zencity creates personalized reports for city officials and law enforcement, using machine learning scanning public conversations from social media, messaging boards, local news outlets, and 311 calls in hopes of finding out how residents respond to a particular issue. Companies like Meltwater and Brandwatch follow similar keyword guidelines for their client companies, but do not prohibit users from viewing individual profiles.
This has been a powerful tool for law enforcement agencies across the country, still responding to the national debate on police reform and the recent crime scene in major cities.
While critics are having these discussions on a public channel, Zencity can receive and produce reports on what they are saying. She doesn’t have full access to the “fire hose” of everything discussed on Facebook and Twitter, but she constantly does personalized searches on social media platforms to explore and weigh her feelings.
“If they come across that location or place, that’s publicly available information, and it’s free for anyone to review,” explained Sheriff Tony Spurlock in Douglas County, Colorado, south of Denver. The sheriff’s office says it used the tool about a year ago $ 72,000 contract Early 2021. The tool provides aggregate information and does not identify individual users.
Feder-Levy says the agencies are being notified of the prohibited use. The software notifies the company that customers use the service to target people or groups, as has happened elsewhere. In 2016, for example, Baltimore police continuous sentences like #MuslimLivesMatter, #DontShoot and #PoliceBrutality.
Spurlock says the software is useful after prosecutors concluded last April that it was justified to shoot two male officers. The details of the shooting are complex: the man was armed with a knife, but has been battling bipolar depression for years and called 911 himself. The dispatch told officials they were responding to an urgent call for domestic violence, but the man’s wife described the call as a welfare check and said she was shot immediately by police.
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