Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.And the capitalists will sell us the rope!
“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.
Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) [More]
[Via Carl S]
So how do we becoe INvisible? here must be a way to go on the net in stealth mode.
ReplyDeleteby lowering the signal to noise ratio. systems such as this are impossible to perfect. you don't even need to see the source, to see how it works, to defeat it, because you can compute that, too. this is a million- or billion-dollar surveillance boondoggle that will do more of the same that the likes of TSA already do: harass and injure the innocent, let the guilty slip right through.
ReplyDeleteI dug a bit into the company on my journal, if you're interested in knowing who runs In-Q-Tel.
ReplyDeleteAlso - and I think this is the single most important part: why does the CIA care? It's because the CIA uses computers to predict the future. As said in the video, variables in the computer models are social interactions, which this company studies. For example: if the CIA wants to know who's going to win the election in 2012, they need information dug out by this private company. Similarly, they could get accurate estimates on how the population would react if the government started rounding people up with firearms, as one example.