When Social Monitoring Goes Local, Privacy Concerns Grow

Social media monitoring is the sausage-making of our online lives. Intellectually, most of us know that big brands and big governments are mining social networks to gather information about the public (heck, some of us ARE those brands), but we usually opt for some tasty denial when it comes to whether or not our personal posts are being watched. However, when social monitoring goes local, the reality of our online visibility is harder to ignore.

Geofeedia, which was recently named a finalist for the Chicago Innovation awards, is one example of a social listening tool with a hyper-local point of view.