The NYPD has spent millions of dollars expanding its capabilities to track and analyze social media posts, new documents have now revealed.
These documents, obtained by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a nonprofit advocacy organization, and shared with The Guardian, show that the New York Police Department (NYPD) signed a contract for nearly $9 million in 2018 with Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that has been sued by Meta for allegedly using nearly 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data from approximately 600,000 users.
The NYPD acquired products from Voyager Labs that the company claims can use artificial intelligence to analyze human behavior online and detect and predict fraud and crime, according to the documents.
A separate document reveals a contract between the Queens District Attorney’s Office and Israeli company Cobwebs Technologies, which also offers social media mapping products as well as tools for tracking location information through mobile phones.
Law enforcement agencies across the United States have worked with social media analytics companies for years, hoping to more effectively and efficiently collect and understand the vast amount of personal information available on the Internet.
However, experts have argued that this practice can cross ethical and legal lines, especially when it is used to access private information, make inferences or predict future crime based on content posted on social networks, or to otherwise help police to avoid obtaining subpoenas and search warrants before collecting information about someone.
William Owen, Stop’s communications director, said there is often little public information available about law enforcement contracts with private surveillance companies, making it difficult to hold law enforcement accountable under existing laws that protect individuals against privacy violations and unreasonable searches and seizures. “You need something like a Freedom of Information request to then receive information from the NYPD, which is often redacted,” he said.
The NYPD contract showed that the department acquired Voyager Labs’ tools, Voyager Analytics and Genesis, for nearly $9 million in 2018 and paid more than $1.6 million to renew the services in 2021. And the department confirmed to The Guardian who is still working with Voyager.
As The Guardian previously reported, Voyager Labs bills itself as a software company that helps police surveil and investigate people by piecing together and reconstructing their entire digital lives.
Internal documents obtained by civil rights organization The Brennan Center and shared with The Guardian in 2021 show that Voyager tells its clients that its analytics software can map a person’s posts and their social connections.
This includes direct connections on social media platforms, as well as “indirect” connections or people with whom the research subject has at least four mutual friends. The company’s user guide states that this allows the software to “discover previously unknown intermediaries or cases of inappropriate association.”
The documents also show that Voyager Analytics allows customers to create “avatars” or fake profiles on social networks to “collect and analyze information that would not otherwise be accessible,” a feature that has infuriated social media companies. .
In fact, Meta sued Voyager in January to ban it from any of its services. At the time, Meta alleged that Voyager had created 38,000 fake Facebook and Instagram accounts. Months later, Meta said he discovered that Voyager had created 17,000 new fake accounts. Voyager has filed to dismiss the lawsuit and denies creating fake accounts.
It’s difficult to say exactly how the NYPD uses Voyager’s software, given the lack of transparency in the contract. However, the department outlined its general policy on social media analysis tools in a 2021 report on the privacy implications of the tools. In the document, the department notes that it uses such tools to discover “information relevant to investigations and to address public safety concerns.”
The NYPD declined to answer detailed questions about how it uses the tools. A police spokesperson said in an email statement that “criminals” are increasingly “using social media to conduct their illegal activities” and that “Voyager helps the Department prevent victimization and apprehend these criminals.” They do not use “characteristics that could be described as predictive of future crime,” the spokesperson added.
Voyager Labs also declined to comment on specific contracts, but a spokesman, William Colston, said the company was proud that government and law enforcement organizations have successfully used its platforms.
Fewer details are available about Cobwebs Technologies and the Queens District Attorney’s contract with the company. The prosecutor published a notice in the April edition of the City Register, an official journal for city agencies to share legal information such as contract acquisitions, that it had signed a one-year contract with Cobwebs for its Tangles and Webloc products. .
