“An unredacted version of the contract, which describes the company’s work as “topic analysis of social media to understand public perception and emerging issues of concern to HMG arising from the Covid-19 crisis”.
No doubt measuring this tweet. And yours.
Creepy.
No doubt measuring this tweet. And yours.
Creepy.
A further paragraph describes how machine learning will be applied to social media data.
Silkie Carlo, the director of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, which discovered the updated contract, expressed alarm at the details.
Silkie Carlo, the director of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, which discovered the updated contract, expressed alarm at the details.
“This is effectively AI-powered mass political surveillance, and it’s been done in a very secretive way, apparently to inform policy,” she said
“It seems from the contract this social media monitoring has been going on for three months, and machine learning has been used for that time. We don’t know what the impact is.” 
A Faculty spokesperson said that the project analysed public posts from Twitter containing words relating to the pandemic, such as “covid” or “coronavirus”, as part of an endeavour to help the government detect emerging issues relating to the pandemic in local communities.
“They said personally identifiable information, such as Twitter usernames or profiles, was stripped out from the data at the point of collection, meaning it would be impossible to use the information to profile any individual or group of people.”
Yeah. Right. No problem.
Yeah. Right. No problem.
