Twitter announced Tuesday that one of its partner companies, which monitors the social network to warn the police of upcoming protests, is not violating any of its surveillance rules.
This company, Dataminr, monitors the flow of public tweets and sends alerts to police or government agencies regarding, among other things, future protests or calls for civil disobedience, such as those linked to the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter.
“Twitter prohibits any use of its development services to set up monitoring tools. Period. But we see a societal benefit in the fact that public data is used for media alerts, first aid aid or aid during natural disasters, ”said a spokesperson for the group, interviewed by AFP. .
The group’s position has sparked a heated debate over what may and may not constitute surveillance.
In recent months, Dataminr has provided government agencies with tweet alerts about calls for demonstrations or streets that activists plan to block, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, who was able to consult these alerts.
One of Dataminr’s services, called “First Alert”, “warns first aid when a serious event occurs, in order to reduce response time and enable them to act quickly,” the company explains on its website.
Twitter specifies that it does not prohibit the setting up of alerts drawn from public tweets. Discussions around the Black Lives Matter movement are among the main topics of discussion on the platform today.
The group claims to have conducted an audit of the products offered by Dataminr and to have found no violation of its rules concerning the prohibition of individual or collective surveillance.