1984 was not supposed to be an operating manual

Twitter, Facebook and Instagram delenda est. Time to severely cap the data we personally put on these platforms. From engadget:

ACLU: Police use Twitter, Facebook data to track protesters
1984 called, it wants its state surveillance scheme back.
According to an ACLU blog post published on Tuesday, law enforcement officials implemented a far-reaching surveillance program to track protesters in both Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD during their recent uprisings and relied on special feeds of user data provided by three top social media companies: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Specifically, all three companies granted access to a developer tool called Geofeedia which allows users to see the geographic origin of social media posts and has been employed by more than 500 law enforcement organizations to track protesters in real time.

Law enforcement's ability to monitor the online activities of protesters could have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights, the post asserts. "These platforms need to be doing more to protect the free speech rights of activists of color and stop facilitating their surveillance by police," Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the ACLU of California, told the Washington Post. "The ACLU shouldn't have to tell Facebook or Twitter what their own developers are doing. The companies need to enact strong public policies and robust auditing procedures to ensure their platforms aren't being used for discriminatory surveillance."

For local police to 'friend' a suspect on Facebook is one thing - that can turn up some useful information and they are only seeing stuff that the moke willingly uploaded for public consumption. For these three companies to give up tools that allow a broad-based 'scraping' of data without letting their customers know is unconscionable. And I know, this is probably covered somewhere between line 350 and line 400 of the End User Licensing Agreement but still.