EchoSec, the brainchild of Karl Swannie and his Victoria-based team, is our Tectorian of the week.
Recently featured in a thought-provoking and somewhat alarming in-depth Vancouver Sun feature, EchoSec’s made-in-Victoria technology hunts for media that has been geo-tagged and is offered by open web servers, going beyond commonly used search tools to enable anyone to capture, curate, manage, process and visualize data in an entirely new way.
Combining geo-tagged location data with social media feeds
In a nutshell, EchoSec combines geo-tagged location data with social media feeds to learn just about anything about anyone online: where you live, where you work, what time you go to work, and possibly even what you were doing at work if you happened to be logged in to any number of popular social networks.
EchoSec aggregates all this information in a single search.
Indeed, the Vancouver Sun writer decided to randomly pick out a traveller at the Vancouver airport to see how much could learned from the traveller’s digital trail.
A completely unfiltered and real-time view of the world
Swannie and his team stumbled across their discovery by accident while working on a search engine to help urban planners determine how people use public spaces.
The EchoSec team is using their unique technology to demonstrate to police, governments, companies and even military organizations that they should be aware information is being shared that is timestamped, traceable, and can be “mined, followed and predicted.”
EchoSec’s unique way of harvesting and displaying dynamic and user-generated content from sites like Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram gives EchoSec a completely unfiltered and real-time view of the world.
Try out the free version of EchoSec and find out for yourself
The free, public version of the EchoSec search engine pulls from just a handful of feeds, while the full version will have close to 500 sources of information that can deliver everything from the risky to the risqué.
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