Technology magazine Wired broke some interesting news today that the investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time, and uses the resulting information to predict future actions and events.

 

The start-up, Recorded Future, scours ten's of thousands of blogs, websites and social media sites (such as Facebook, Twitter etc) to find the relationships between people, organisations, accidents and incidents - both present and yet to occur.

 

In a white paper document released by the company, Recorded Future claims it's temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search", by looking at the hidden connections between individuals and communications that talk about the same, or related entities and events.

 

The idea is then to identify, for each incident, who is involved, where it will happen and when. Recorded Future then tracks "chatter" relating to this in order to show "online momentum" for the given event.

 

This ability to potentially predict the curve makes the 16 person, Massachusetts based team a very attractive investment to Google Ventures, the investment division of the search engine giant, and In-Q-Tel, which operates in a similar manner on behalf of the CIA and wider intelligence community.

 

 

This news is of concern to critics and privacy campaigners, particularly due to the proximity of it's announcement to the news which broke earlier this week that 1 billion Facebook profiles had been crawled and stored to a file which is now publicly available on download website BitTorrent.

 

The file, which contains details such as the users name, profile URL, contact details and even their friends names (even if they're friends had ensured their privacy settings were at their maximum level), is entirely legal due to the fact that the information was publicly available through Facebook's open access directory.

 

Now major organisations have been found to have downloaded this information, including individuals at Apple, the BBC and Bertlesmann media to name but a few.