The Department of Health and Human Services wants full access to all of your social media data to monitor public health issues. Not only do they want current data, the creeps want to be able to go back five years.
The Washington Free Beacon has the details of the latest government intrusion into our lives.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking a “social media analytic tool” that will give the government access to “full Twitter historical data,” according to a solicitation released on Tuesday.
The agency is seeking feedback for a “possible future acquisition to provide near real time social media analysis.” HHS said it wants to use the tool for “ongoing monitoring” of public health issues.
HHS provides a long list of requirements, including “access to real-time social media posts,” and “access to full Twitter firehose.”
The agency requires an archive that goes back at least five years of “full Twitter historical data.” The government will also need “access to multiple account log-ins,” “real-time alerting,” the “ability to construct lengthy Boolean searches,” and a function that can filter search results based on the location of a Twitter user. (Read More)
They want to be able to put it all into a spreadsheet. Can you image what that spreadsheet would look like with the millions of tweets and facebook posts that go out every day? Oh, and they say they need this tool so they can be ready to respond in the case of health emergencies, natural disasters and terrorist attacks. But there’s already a tool for something like that, it’s called a hashtag and doesn’t cost a dime to use or monitor.
