Personally I agree, but only on the basis that they appear to be only archiving publicly accessible information and the old mantra of "what you post online, stays online".
Just imagine how much crime we could stop if local police had full access email, phone, and social networking data.
Or if everyone's lives were already controlled to the extent that they're essentially living in jail already... that seems like the ultimate result of a gradual increase in pervasive surveillance: people will become so used to, unable to oppose, and scared at the possibility of even thoughtcrime that they'll have no choice but to complacently conform, not unlike Orwell's 1984.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to call this "a new kind of spying" all of the data they're using is publicly available. I don't think it's a realistic view for the future that we'll be able to put things we don't want people to know about on public forums and trust that no one's going to build the tools to piece it together. That sounds like a really unsustainable security through obscurity situation to me.
Actual spies devote substantial resources to analyzing publicly available information.[1] I'm not really sure how I feel about all of this as a moral or political issue, but I do think it's fair say that it's "a new kind of spying".
Put another way -- the FBI has long had the ability to follow you around as you drove around town on publicly accessible roads. But the ability to track millions of people on public roads via cell phone triangulation is unprecedented.
Just because something is possible and legal doesn't make it moral. The situation you describe as "unsustainable" is what many would call a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Images can be cross referenced against other ads to detect hidden relationships.
Evidence artifacts can be collected and introduced during criminal proceedings.
Rescue Forensics collects millions of records for anti-trafficking investigations and prosecution.
Search by phone number, text, or images, and filter by location, age, and date ranges.
Hidden phone numbers are unmasked so human traffickers can’t hide their victims online.
Intelligence from across the world can be searched in one central location.
Images can be cross-referenced against the rest of the web to find profiles and social media accounts.
Our intuitive interface allows you to target the intelligence you need on all your devices.
Yeah. So, you're straight-up building a massive blackmail ledger, without a stated business model other than "We're helping the police save the children!".
One of my favorites, also from your front page:
STOP SENDING SUBPOENAS
Our database contains millions of records of classified advertisements representing up to two years of historical data. Stop waiting days or weeks to get a subpoena response from a hosting site that may only offer a few months of records. Find all the targeted intelligence you need right now.
Yeah, man, that whole due-process thing is a pain in the ass, isn't it? Better to do the work for the .gov instead of making them follow their own laws.
~
I don't think it is a surprise to anyone who's been watching the trends lately with regards to law enforcement in the US and the trends with data mining that you are not receiving an unconditional pat on the back.
Frankly, companies like yours are part of the problem--even if you do offer help in the small picture.
EDIT:
Bahahahahahaha, I love this one:
The user-generated information archived by Rescue Forensics is completely unmodified and retrieval of this information is an automated process. We only redact copyrighted material, such as company logos or other intellectual property.
Yes, so, you've got protection for companies, but nothing against, say, a deliberate smear campaign. Your platform looks like it doesn't do anything to prevent, say, a bunch of jerks deliberately scattering fake evidence, and you'll hoover it up all the same, I'm betting?
>Yes, so, you've got protection for companies
No, this protection is in the other direction - of their own lower back _from_ the companies. They don't care about smaller fish which can't bite.
Anyway, all this bro-hah-hah piled upon them is pointless. They are just one of many Palantir wannabes. There is no way they or others can be stopped. You can't stop the wave. A new kind of society is upon us where everybody would be able to know everything about everybody and thus information assymmetry power (be it of corporations, governments or whomever) will be no more.
Can a police officer just send a subpoena to them and get all the information for free?
No, it's what use you put those records to that is the definition.
I can collect the license plate numbers of every car that goes down my street in the morning. It's when I use that to figure out which house to break into that I cross the line.
The problem is that there is no distinguishing those cases until something bad happens, and by then it's too late.
Readily able to read and write due diligence are literate, educated, emotionally-intelligent populations who can be a part of (the granular war to determine) distinguishing records.
Your company is going to have problems with EU privacy laws.
It's not anonymous when people put their phone number in the ad for commercial purposes.
So the flaw in the algebra is that the government can buy services for things it cannot legally do itself. Which means, doing or buying should be considered equivalent, to regular citizens it does. Corporations and governments have special rights where misdeeds are waved off with warnings or a change in position.
On their data collection they will discover paedos --which is great, but they will also be able to discover philanderers, cads, tax cheats, drug users, etc. If these things fall under law enforcement's orbit, that's one thing, the bad thing is the possibility of third parties getting this data and using it to blackmail people.
Maybe they already have that angle covered, in which case, nevermind.
If the police had that access, wouldn't the criminals avoid the insecure communication medium?
Edit: I don't mean that Russia could literally use this company's product. I meant the principle.
If someone said they had software that analyzed these same sites but provided no reason or impetus, a lot more eyebrows would be raised. When you say it's to protect children, there's an (expected) emotional response that makes this sort of thing easier to digest.
This private company is building a mass surveillance database to track people. They're scraping and archiving what used to be considered anonymous postings. Their current goal is to go after sex trafficking, but they could easily expand into spying on people for any reason.
They're not the government, so I think they have a strong right to do this, but don't let cause of "the children" confuse the issue. This is a new kind of spying, unlike anything that has existed in the history of American society.
Just imagine how much crime we could stop if local police had full access email, phone, and social networking data. There's no question that we could save thousands of children per year. You would have to be a monster or a terrorist not to consent to having your data searched.