not the FBI, CIA, Interpol, Mossad, NSA or any other government agency.
Walmart all but claims that name at: Social Genome.
From the webpage:
In a sense, the social world — all the millions and billions of tweets, Facebook messages, blog postings, YouTube videos, and more – is a living organism itself, constantly pulsating and evolving. The Social Genome is the genome of this organism, distilling it to the most essential aspects.
At the labs, we have spent the past few years building and maintaining the Social Genome itself. We do this using public data on the Web, proprietary data, and a lot of social media. From such data we identify interesting entities and relationships, extract them, augment them with as much information as we can find, then add them to the Social Genome.
For example, when Susan Boyle was first mentioned on the Web, we quickly detected that she was becoming an interesting person in the world of social media. So we added her to the Social Genome, then monitored social media to collect more information about her. Her appearances became events, and the bigger events were added to the Social Genome as well. As another example, when a new coffee maker was mentioned on the Web, we detected and added it to the Social Genome. We strive to keep the Social Genome up to date. For example, we typically detect and add information from a tweet into the Social Genome within two seconds, from the moment the tweet arrives in our labs.
As a result of our effort, the Social Genome is a vast, constantly changing, up-to-date knowledge base, with hundreds of millions of entities and relationships. We then use the Social Genome to perform semantic analysis of social media, and to power a broad array of e-commerce applications. For example, if a user never uses the word “coffee”, but has mentioned many gourmet coffee brands (such as “Kopi Luwak”) in his tweets, we can use the Social Genome to detect the brands, and infer that he is interested in gourmet coffee. As another example, using the Social Genome, we may find that a user frequently mentions movies in her tweets. As a result, when she tweeted “I love salt!”, we can infer that she is probably talking about the movie “salt”, not the condiment (both of which appear as entities in the Social Genome).
Two seconds after you hit “send” on your tweet, it has been stripped, analyzed and added to the Social Genome at WalMart. For every tweet. Plus other data.
How should we respond to this news?
One response is to trust that WalMart and whoever it sells this data trove to, will use the information to enhance your shopping experience and achieve greater fulfilment by balancing shopping against your credit limit.
Another response is to ask for legislation to attempt regulation of a multi-national corporation that is larger than many governments.
Another response is to hold sit-ins and social consciousness raising events at WalMart locations.
My suggestion? One good turn deserves another.
WalMart is owned by someone. Walmart has a board of directors. Walmart has corporate officers. Walmart has managers, sales representatives, attorneys and advertising executives. All of who have information footprints. Perhaps not as public as ours, but they exist. Wny not gather up information on who is running Walmart? Fighting fire with fire as they say. Publish that information so that regulators, stock brokers, divorce lawyers and others can have access to it.
Let’s welcome WalMart as “Little Big Brothers.”