Investigation software snoops through social networks - Techworld.com

We will love our social network future. Our data in silos ;) 
Well, it depends where you are on the cable. 

In Investigation software snoops through social networks - Techworld.com
At http://news.techworld.com/applications/3214195/investigation-software-snoops-through-social-networks/

Hone works in tandem with NarusInsight. By Nucci's 
own admission, however, it can do some pretty 
"scary" things. The software's user creates a 
target profile, and Hone then proceeds to link 
what Nucci calls "islands of information." Hone 
can analyse VOIP conversations, biometrically 
identify someone's voice or photograph and then 
associate it with different phone numbers.

"I can have a sample of your voice in English, and 
you can start speaking Mandarin tomorrow. It 
doesn't matter; I'm going to catch you."

It uses artificial intelligence to analyse emails 
and can link mails to different accounts, doing 
what Nucci calls topical analysis. "It's going to 
go through a set of documents and automatically 
it's going to organise them in topics. I'm not 
talking about keywords as is done today, I'm 
talking about topics," he said.

That can't be done with today's technology, he 
said. "If you search for fertilisers on Google... 
it's going to come back with 6.5 million pages. 
Enjoy," he said. "If you want to search for 
non-farmers who are discussing fertiliser... it's 
not even searchable."

Hone will sift through millions of profiles 
searching for people with similar attributes, 
blogger profiles that share the same email 
address, for example. It can look for 
statistically likely matches, by studying things 
like the gender, nationality, age, location, home 
and work addresses of people.

Another component can trace the location of 
someone using a mobile device such as a laptop or 
phone. Bit by bit, it pieces together the 
subject's different identities on the Internet.

Narus is still testing the waters with Hone. 
Working with a consortium of universities, the 
company has used Hone to sift through massive 
amounts of public information. "We started to 
collect data three years ago and we've gone 
through several programs," Nucci said. "We have 
something like 75 million users in our system." 
With the permission of users, Nucci's team also 
analyzed data on about 50,000 private profiles.


-- 
Karl Dubost
Montréal, QC, Canada
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/

Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2010 14:06:16 UTC