Facebook Tracking – Defense Firm Software Can Track You

Social media and their network sites just got a whole lot creepier with the news released by The Guardian UK that there is now a software that can track and analyze anyone through social sites and predict their activities.

So I hope you haven't made a terrorist joke or slammed on the president recently.

The Massachusetts defense firm Raytheon has invented a program, RIOT (Rapid Information Overlay Technology), that can track people through their social networking and predict their activities based on the information found through post and interactions.

A video post on The Guardian UK website, also seen below, shows just how it works.

Raytheon uses a staffer at the firm and go through the process of how the software works. They tracked his regular visits to the gym, the park, etc. Furthermore, the video shows a spider diagram of the staffer's online relationships with certain people. Essentially, anything and everything you need to know about that person - the system can find and figure it out.

Originally Raytheon did not want the video online but Guardian posted it anyways and I'm glad they did. I'm not one to be a "conspiracy theorist" and I am hopeful the program will be used to track terrorist in the coming years - though, according to Raytheon the US government hasn't offered to pay for RIOT. What does worry me though is the "Big Brother" mentality that is probably happening already but this adds to it. I, like most, are guilty of allowing ourselves to post literally everything online about us making it almost too easy for this program to watch over us.

Thoughts?