Is my privacy worth someone’s death?
In the wake of the shooting in Tuscon, there has been much discussion regarding the shooter’s various social media profiles. People are analyzing all the different things the shooter said and wrote through various mediums; YouTube and Facebook being the most quoted and analyzed. Without delving into what his dark and seemingly incoherent blogs/profiles/videos said, the question is being asked, “Could we have seen this coming?” and “Should we have seen this coming?”.
This week, while in San Francisco, I spent some time with a great guy and new friend, Frederik. He is from Sweden and is co-founder of the company www.Saplo.com. Their product can scrape huge amounts of text, tag the important words in that text, and analyze the sentiment of the text. One commercial application of this product is brand sentiment analysis. For example, Coca Cola could pay Saplo money to analyze all the text on the entire world wide web and they would report back the overall sentiment of the world towards Coca Cola. By the way, they could do this in minutes.
It got me to thinking, could we use these types of enterprise tools to analyze user profiles’ sentiments? Could we possibly monitor the content distributed by potential killers and mass murderers, and stop them before they commit a crime? Would it be possible to sort of let a computer use “pre-cognition” to determine criminal intent? Could the shooting in Tuscon have been avoided?
I think think the real question is should we do these things, not could we. Where would the line be drawn? Would everyone’s online activity need to be monitored? How would we delineate between feelings and actual intent? How violating would a world like I am describing be? Think about that….
But, a much harder question: is my privacy worth someone else’s death?
