ACLU singles out Ontario company for helping U.S. police use racial profiling

A Canadian company’s innovative social media monitoring platform has been identified by the American Civil Liberties Union as an “especially offensive” tool it claims police are using to violate civil rights.

London, Ont.-based Media Sonar, is one of three social media monitoring platforms whose access has been cut off by Twitter, which says the company’s surveillance of users is a violation of its policies.

In particular, the ACLU takes issue with Media Sonar’s suggestion to Fresno Police to track hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter and #ripmikebrown, referring to the 18-year-old African-American man shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in 2014.

“The idea that people could be labeled as “threats to public safety” simply for objecting to police violence is chilling,” says a recent ACLU blog post.

Nicole Ozer, Tech and Civil Liberties Policy Director for the ACLU California, says records obtained by her organization from 63 police, sheriff and district attorney departments in the state found 40 per cent of them were using social media surveillance tools.

“Social media has become the digital town square- where millions of us connect and communicate about the most important issues in our lives and the core political and social issues in our country. Police can’t be allowed to sneak in through surveillance side doors and use these platforms to digitally round up activists,” Ozer says in a statement emailed to Yahoo Canada News.

These “secretive” technologies magnify the impact of racial profiling, she says.

A person who answered the telephone at Media Sonar’s Ontario office said no one was immediately available to comment. Nor did any company representative respond to email requests from Yahoo Canada News.

Last year, Media Sonar was awarded by the London Chamber of Commerce and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce for its innovative technology.

The company says its technology helps “corporate security, sports, entertainment and education organizations target relevant data to gain knowledge and improve decision-making.”

But in emails to the Fresno Police department, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to Yahoo Canada News, the company says its platform is “specifically designed for law enforcement.”

“It offers a number of critical applications that allow law enforcement professionals to mine social media for criminal activity, monitor and manage crisis events, and collaborates across jurisdictions,” the email says.

Last fall, Media Sonar was one of three companies barred by Twitter because the social media provider said it violates the company’s policy on surveillance. Geofeedia and Snaptrends were also cut off.

“We prohibit developers using the Public APIs and Gnip data products from allowing law enforcement — or any other entity — to use Twitter data for surveillance purposes. Period,” Chris Moody, Twitter’s vice-president of data, said in a statement posted on the site Nov. 22.

The fact that the data is shared publicly does not change that, Moody wrote.

Ann Cavoukian, a former privacy commissioner for Ontario and now executive director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University, says it’s outrageous, not just for privacy reasons but from an accuracy perspective.

“To use these kinds of social media surveillance tools to try and identify threats to public safety by tracking… the folly in that. I don’t even know where to begin,” she tells Yahoo Canada News.

“People lie all the time on social media. There’s so much information out there that you can’t assess the veracity of. You can’t rely on that information as some kind of tool for law enforcement, it is just the height of absurdity to me.”

The value of any information gathered this way is questionable, Cavoukian says.

It’s done without consent or public transparency and without independent oversight, she says. How long is this questionable threat assessment maintained and how does a person clear their name, she asks?

And this kind of intelligence seems unlikely to withstand a court challenge, she says.

“That scares me the most because this can have detrimental impacts on your life.”

Cavoukian says she is not aware of whether or not Canadian police are using these platforms “but, having said that, it wouldn’t surprise me that if they’re not doing it already, that they’re considering doing it.”