Under pressure from the ACLU in California, Twitter cuts off geospatial intelligence data being sold by Dataminr to police, prohibiting its use for surveillance
Russell Brandom / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second domino in the ACLU of Northern California's campaign against social-media surveillance. Its October report showed that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter had all granted data access to Geofeedia, and all three cut ties within days — leaving Geofeedia small enough that it laid off half its staff by November. Twitter had already drawn one line months earlier, when it asked Dataminr, which taps its full firehose, to bar US intelligence agencies.
The new move extends that line from spies to domestic police: Dataminr can no longer sell geospatial intelligence derived from tweets to law enforcement or permit its use for surveillance. The pressure came specifically from the ACLU in California, and the pattern suggests written policy, not informal requests, is where this ends up.
First-order effects
- Police departments using Dataminr's geospatial alerts lose a real-time Twitter-derived surveillance feed immediately, since Twitter controls the firehose Dataminr's product runs on.
- Dataminr loses a law-enforcement revenue segment while keeping its commercial and news customers, narrowing its business to whatever uses Twitter's terms still allow.
Second-order effects
- Other social-media monitoring vendors selling to police now face the same single point of failure Geofeedia hit: their product exists at the pleasure of platform terms of service, and revocation is existential rather than incremental.
- Facebook, facing the same ACLU pressure, moves from ad-hoc cutoffs to codified rules — by March 2017 it explicitly prohibits developers from using Facebook or Instagram data in surveillance tools, converting one-off enforcement into standing policy.
Third-order effects
- Platform terms of service become the de facto regulatory regime for police social-media surveillance, with civil-liberties groups acting as the enforcement trigger — but the boundary holds only as well as platforms police it, and later reporting that Dataminr relayed tweets about BLM protesters to police despite these restrictions shows how porous that self-policing can be.
The trend: Access to platform data, not legislation, is becoming the primary lever controlling which surveillance tools police can buy — with advocacy groups like the ACLU deciding when that lever gets pulled.