blog/data/2016-01-24-nice-creepy.txt

   1 Title: Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software
   2 Tags: english, debian, nice free software
   3 Date: 2016-01-24 10:50
   4
   5 <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
   6 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
   7 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
   8 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
   9 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
  10 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
  11 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
  12 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
  13 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
  14 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
  15 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
  16 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
  17 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
  18 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
  19 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
  20 entities.</p>
  21
  22 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
  23
  24 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
  25 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
  26 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
  27 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
  28 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
  29 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
  30 tool to do so is called
  31 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
  32 discovered it when I read
  33 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
  34 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
  35 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
  36 The python program was in Debian, but
  37 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
  38 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
  39 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
  40 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
  41 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
  42 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
  43 are now included
  44 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
  45
  46 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
  47 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
  48 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
  49 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
  50 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
  51 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
  52 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
  53 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
  54 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
  55 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
  56 about yourself with the services.</p>
  57
  58 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
  59 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
  60 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
  61 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
  62 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
  63 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
  64 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
  65 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
  66 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
  67 things.  A similar technique have been
  68 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
  69 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
  70 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
  71 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
  72 public.</p>
  73
  74 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
  75 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
  76 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
  77 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
  78
  79 <p>(I have uploaded
  80 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
  81 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
  82 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>