Mapping Secret Information and Using social media to find out what people are doing

March 31, 2014 - PRLog -- Echosec Systems and the Echosec social search engine was recently featured (Saturday, March 30, 2014) in the popular Vancouver Sun newspaper. The full page article was the main feature on the front page, accompanied by a prominent image, and highlights the importance and popularity of the topic of social media and privacy in today's age of digital sharing and open public data feeds.

The article by Gillian Shaw walked through a sample scenario where the echosec social search map was used to randomly identify a youg girl and determine information about her, including specific locations of her residence and places she frequently visits, all by data mining of public feeds made accessible via the Echosec social map search service.

From the article... Creepy? Yes. Hard to do? No. Just ask Karl Swannie, founder of Victoria technology start-up EchoSec, a company that has created a search engine that mines close to 500 data feeds, including social media networks and open data from governments and the private sector - the search engine I used to randomly pick out a traveller at the Vancouver airport to see how much I could learn from their digital trail.

If it hadn't been for EchoSec aggregating everything posted from a location in a single search, it would have been difficult to pick out the teen's single Twitter post from millions of others. What sets EchoSec apart from other search technology is its ability to "geo-fence" - that is, to draw a virtual line around a building or an area, and to tap into all the publicly available data from that location. That means not only social media feeds but open data that could include everything from live webcam feeds to government information.

EchoSec's search engine - which mines photos, text and other information posted by social media users and links it to maps - reflects a trend that is seeing companies manipulate large amounts of data in a way that is raising concerns among privacy advocates and prompting warnings from Internet and child safety experts... EchoSec's full search engine can reveal far more information than the public version, and privacy and security experts point out that others can tap into the same available data - both for good (law enforcement) and for bad.

The article is available online - http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/sto...

See Also: The withering of secrecy: Technology reveals your life on social media http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/personal-tech/secr...

About Echosec

EchoSec is the next generation of the Search that connects you with trillions of pictures and posts made by billions of people, which never normally make it to common search engines. EchoSec is the first Search Engine of its kind to realize that ‘where’ matters as much as ‘what’, and brings it all together to clearly show the insufficiencies of current data monitoring techniques to control ‘secret’ and ‘classified’ information. http://www.echosec.net