NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles

Documents show authorities bought Voyager Lab products which the company claims can use AI to map online human behavior

New York law enforcement agencies have spent millions of dollars to expand their capabilities to track and analyze social media posts, new documents show, including by contracting with a surveillance firm accused of improperly scraping social media platforms for data.

Documents obtained by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a privacy advocacy non-profit and shared with the Guardian, reveal the New York police department in 2018 entered a nearly $9m contract with Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that has been sued by Meta for allegedly using nearly 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data on an estimated 600,000 users.

NYPD purchased Voyager Labs products that the company claims can use artificial intelligence to analyze online human behavior and detect and predict fraud and crimes, the documents show.

A separate document reveals a contract between the Queens district attorney and Israeli firm Cobwebs Technologies, which also offers social network mapping products, as well as tools to track location information through phones. It’s unclear how much that contract is worth.

Law enforcement across the United States have worked with social media analytics companies for years, hoping to more effectively and efficiently collect and make sense of the hordes of personal information available on the internet.

But experts have argued the practice can cross ethical and legal lines, particularly when used to access private information, make inferences or predict future criminality based on the content posted on social media, or otherwise help law enforcement skip obtaining subpoenas and warrants before gathering information on someone.

William Owen, the communications director at Stop, said there’s often also little public information available on law enforcement’s contracts with private surveillance companies, which make it difficult to hold law enforcement accountable to existing laws that protect people against privacy violations and unreasonable searches and seizures. “It takes something like a [Freedom of Information Law] request to then receive any information from the NYPD, which often is redacted,” he said.

The NYPD contract showed the department purchased Voyager Labs tools, Voyager Analytics and Genesis, for nearly $9m in 2018 and paid over $1.6m to renew the services in 2021. And the department confirmed to the Guardian it is still working with Voyager.

As the Guardian previously reported, Voyager Labs pitches itself as a software company that helps law enforcement surveil and investigate people by pulling together and reconstructing their entire digital lives.

Internal documents the civil rights organization The Brennan Center obtained and shared with the Guardian in 2021 show that Voyager tells its clients its analytics software can map out a person’s posts and their social connections. That includes the direct connections on social media platforms, as well as “indirect” connections or people with whom the subject of the investigation has at least four mutual friends. The company’s user guide indicates this allows the software to “unearth previously unknown middlemen or instances of improper association”. Even if someone deletes a friend, the company maintains an archive of their former connection.

The documents also show Voyager Analytics enables clients to create “avatars” or fake social media profiles to “collect and analyze information that is otherwise inaccessible”, a feature that has drawn the ire of social media companies. Facebook-parent company Meta sued in January to banVoyager from accessing any of its services. At the time, Meta alleged Voyager had made 38,000 fake Facebook and Instagram accounts. Months later, Meta said it discovered Voyager had created 17,000 new fake accounts, despite revoking the company’s access to Facebook and Instagram and sending two separate cease-and-desist letters. Voyager has filed to dismiss the lawsuit and denies making fake accounts.

It’s hard to tell exactly how the NYPD is using Voyager software, given the lack of transparency into the contract.

But the department did describe its overall policy on social network analysis tools in a 2021 report on the privacy implications of the tools. In the paper, the department notes that it uses such tools to discover “information relevant to investigations and to address public safety concerns”.

The department uses the tools to analyze both publicly available information and “information that is viewable as a result of user privacy settings or practices”, according to the document. The latter is ambiguously phrased, but New York police are legally permitted to use fake social media profiles and if someone unknowingly accepts a friend request from a cop it counts as consent, according to Stop legal director David Siffert.

Social media analytics tools may also be used to find connections between potential subjects of a criminal investigation, the department stipulated in the paper, and to notify police when a person whose profile they have been tracking posts something new and collect and archive that new information.

NYPD declined to answer detailed questions about how it uses the tools. A spokesperson said in an emailed statement that “offenders” increasingly “utilize social media in furtherance of their unlawful activities” and that “Voyager assists the Department in preventing victimization and apprehending these offenders”. They do not use “features that would be described as predictive of future criminality”, the spokesperson added.

Voyager Labs would not comment on specific contracts but a spokesperson, William Colston, said the company was proud that governmental and law enforcement organizations have successfully used its platforms.

There are fewer details about Cobwebs Technologies and the Queens district attorney’s contract with the firm. The DA posted a notice in the April issue of the city record, an official journal for city agencies to share legal information such as contract procurements, that it had entered into a year-long contract with Cobwebs for its Tangles and Webloc products.

Much like Voyager, Cobwebs says Tangles, its web investigation platform, can help “easily identify new threats, reveal hidden connections” by analyzing personal and other data available on the internet. A company video shows the software may use facial recognition and image recognition in its processes and, like Voyager, maps out potential connections between people based on data from the internet and social media to create a “detailed” target profile.

An archived landing page on Cobweb’s site describes Webloc as a “location intelligence platform that provides access to vast amounts of location-based data in any specified geographic location”. The website does not specify where the tool gets that data. But a 2021 contract with the Navy indicates Webloc collects location information through mobile phones in addition to other personal data such as demographic information and what apps are installed on devices.

The Queens DA declined to provide details on how it uses Coweb’s products, but did specify it does not use or subscribe to the location tracking feature the company offers and only accesses public information.

A spokesperson for Cobwebs, AJ Guenther, said the company does not comment on specific law enforcement contracts but said that Cobwebs operates “according to the law and we adhere to strict standards and regulations, like GDPR in the EU, in respect to privacy protection”.

• New York
• US policing
• news

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK2jYrumw9JoaWlqY2TApryOaW9oppWserq70aRkqaecnrCmedOrmJyjmaO0bsLOspignaJiuaKu0maknqyRYrCwutOrmJys