Surveillance Using Facial Recognition and Social Media Data

Sammanfattning: People share more and more on social media, aware that they are being surveilled but unaware of the scope and the ways that their data is processed. Large amounts of resources are dedicated to performing the surveillance, both in terms of labor and computation. This project explores the scope of data collection and processing by showing that it is possible to gather, process, and store data from the social media platforms Twitter and Reddit in real-time using only a personal computer. The focus was to use facial recognition to find specific individuals in the stream of data, but the data collected can be used for other purposes. We have also explored the ethical concerns regarding both the collection and processing of such data.