Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show expanded byline information on articles

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Apple and Microsoft want you to notice how their AI works. But why?

OpenAI starts training a new AI model while forming a safety committee

Debunking misinformation failed. Welcome to ‘pre-bunking’

Points influencers are everywhere. Some trips look too good to be true.

Want to find hidden gem restaurants? Follow the business crowd to lunch. 

9 rules for boarding a flight like a civilized person

AI will transform sports betting. It will also increase the risks.

Here’s who The Post endorses in D.C. Council primary elections

How (not) to fix the border

Victor Robles, out of chances with Nats, is designated for assignment

Commanders kicker Brandon McManus accused of sexual assault in lawsuit

Trevor Williams keeps dealing as Nationals shut down Mariners again

Teen made app for peers who are anxious, lonely: ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’

She graduated from Yale after raising 3 kids. Her son was her classmate.

I was homeless as a kid. Here’s how I survived. 

A year after paying off our 2.75% mortgage, we still have no regrets

Home-insurance payouts are shrinking. Here’s how to prevent the worst.

Maxed out on your credit card? Here’s how to dig out.

Miss Manners: Guests keep dropping hair on my carpet

Carolyn Hax: Family clown hopes to pivot by offering sincere support

Ask Amy: A delightful update from a struggling artist

Trump pledges to turn ‘love it or leave it’ into policy

Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour

Biden heading back to Pa. this week; Trump trial nears end

In photos: The scene in the southern Plains after storms killed over a dozen people

Scenes after deadly landslide in Papua New Guinea

Large tornado hits southern Illinois

Vatican apologizes after Pope Francis is accused of using homophobic slur

Long-lost Caravaggio painting of ‘extraordinary value’ shown for first time

Biden’s deal with Saudi Arabia may be dead on arrival, thankfully

A powerful surveillance program that police used for tracking racially charged protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., relied on special feeds of user data provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to <a href="https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed-target">an ACLU report</a> Tuesday.

The companies provided the data — often including the locations, photos and other information posted publicly by users — to Geofeedia, a Chicago-based company that says it analyzes social media posts to deliver real-time surveillance information to help 500 law enforcement agencies track and respond to crime. The social media companies cut off Geofeedia’s access to the streams of user data in recent weeks after the ACLU discovered them and alerted the companies about looming public exposure.

The popularity of Geofeedia and similar programs highlights how the rise of social media has given governments worldwide powerful new ways to monitor crime and civil unrest. Authorities often target such surveillance at minority groups or others seeking to publicly air political grievances, potentially chilling free speech, said the ACLU’s California affiliate, which unearthed Geofeedia’s relationship with social media companies through a public records request of dozens of law enforcement agencies.

“These platforms need to be doing more to protect the free speech rights of activists of color and stop facilitating their surveillance by police,” said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the ACLU of California. “The ACLU shouldn’t have to tell Facebook or Twitter what their own developers are doing. The companies need to enact strong public policies and robust auditing procedures to ensure their platforms aren’t being used for discriminatory surveillance.”


<i>
    [A U.S. judge just disclosed how often law enforcement asked to secretly track electronic records]
  </i>


In a statement, Geofeedia chief executive Phil Harris said the company “is committed to the principles of personal privacy, transparency and both the letter and the spirit of the law when it comes to individual rights.”

He added that the firm works to ensure “end-users do not seek to inappropriately identify individuals based on race, ethnicity, religious, sexual orientation or political beliefs, among other factors. That said, we understand. . . that we must continue to work to build on these critical protections of civil rights.”

Twitter tweeted in a statement, “Based on information in the @ACLU’s report, we are immediately suspending @Geofeedia’s commercial access to Twitter data.”

Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in a statement that Geofeedia was accessing its data improperly: “This developer only had access to data that people chose to make public. . .. If a developer uses our [user data] in a way that has not been authorized, we will take swift action to stop them and we will end our relationship altogether if necessary.”

Most users of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram know the social media services as platforms for sharing thoughts or images with friends. But companies such as Geofeedia and others collect and analyze social media data to help their own customers track emerging online trends. Specialized data streams from social media companies can provide access to faster, more exhaustive collections of posts than otherwise are publicly available.

Civil libertarians have grown increasingly concerned that the rising power of government surveillance technology is prompting a spike in the monitoring of African Americans and other minority groups through video surveillance, social media and the tracking of cellphone calls.


<i>
    [In Baltimore, the police and a private company are running surveillance flights like never before]
  </i>


“Police spying on social media has a disproportionate impact on black people,” said Malkia Cyril, the executive director of the Center for Media Justice, an Oakland-based activist group. “There’s a movement afoot to ensure that black lives matter. That is being spied upon. That is being surveilled.”

Before the social media companies began blocking access in recent weeks, Geofeedia was using specialized data streams for police surveillance. In one email discovered by the ACLU, a company employee boasted that it had a “confidential legally binding agreement with Facebook” for data. Another email said users of Geofeedia could “pull private information for Instagram and Twitters.”

Neither claim could be independently verified.

Because social media posts increasingly provide location information from users’ smartphones, surveillance systems can map out areas of looming unrest or political activism. Geofeedia documents made public by the ACLU made references to tracking protests in Baltimore in 2015 after the death of a black man, Freddie Gray, while in police custody and also to protests in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 after the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make most of their money selling advertising, but all have side businesses selling outsiders access to their rich data streams about users. For example, through software known as an API, developers have been able to use Facebook to get access to a person’s friend list, birthday, profile picture, education history, relationship status, and political affiliation - if a person’s Facebook profile and location are public. \

Twitter also sells its own so-called data firehose, which includes the contents of tweets, and demographic information like gender and interests, the cellular network users and geolocation, by latitude and longitude coordinates, if the user tags it. Customers include financial firms that monitor business trends, retailers looking for product mentions, organizations like the Red Cross, which use the data to monitor crises, and law enforcement.

According to the documents obtained by the ACLU, Facebook provided Geofeedia with access to a data feed that enabled the surveillance startup to monitor topics trending from public posts about events, such as riots or protests. Twitter did not provide access to the full firehose, but offered Geofeedia a database to search public tweets. Instagram provided access to the Instagram API, which included photos posted publicly as well as location information if the users tagged their pictures.

News stories about Geofeedia, which was founded in 2011, first emerged last month, when the Daily Dot website reported that local police in Denver had spent $30,000 on online surveillance tools. Shortly after, the ACLU of California published public records showing that police departments across the state were rapidly acquiring social media monitoring software to monitor activists.

The ACLU said the social media companies had sought to close Geofeedia’s access to the special data feeds. Facebook and Instagram closed off Geofeedia’s access on Sept. 19. Twitter imposed contractual limits in an attempt to block Geofeedia from using posts for surveillance. Twitter also sent a cease and desist letter on Monday to Geofeedia, the ACLU said. On Tuesday, Twitter announced it would block the feed to Geofeedia altogether.

The civil liberties group said that social media companies should go farther in implementing public policies and other restrictions to keep their posts from being used for government surveillance. Without specialized data feeds, outside companies could still implement programs to “scrape” social media data as it becomes publicly available, but that approach would be less effective and also would violate the terms of service for some companies.

In addition to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the Geofeedia documents found by the ACLU show that the company also analyzes data from Vine and Periscope, as well as VK and Weibo, popular social media services in Russia and China, respectively. It is not clear whether any of those companies provide special data feeds to Geofeedia.

Connecticut College

Craig Timberg is a deputy managing editor for The Washington Post. Since joining The Post in 1998, he has been a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent, and he contributed to The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the National Security Agency and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Craig Timberg

Winner of the 2017 Overseas Press Club Bob Considine Award for "Behind the Firewall" Series on Silicon Valley China

 2010 Finalist, Livingston Award for Young Journalists

 2009 Finalist, Livingston Award for Young Journalists 

Columbia University, BA. 

Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, MS.

Lizza joined The Washington Post as Silicon Valley correspondent in 2016, becoming the paper's eyes and ears in the region. She focuses on social media and the power of the tech industry in a democratic society. Before that, she was the Wall Street Journal's first full-time beat reporter covering AI and the impact of algorithms on people's lives. 