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Dataminr
Company typePrivate company
IndustryReal-time information
Founded2009; 15 years ago (2009)
FoundersTed Bailey
Headquarters
Manhattan, New York
,
U.S.
Key people
Ted Bailey, CEO
ProductsSoftware as a Service
Number of employees
950+ (2022)
Websitedataminr.com

Dataminr is an artificial intelligence company. The company's private sector product, Dataminr Pulse, is used by corporations to monitor real-time events, and to aid with crisis response by providing playbooks, messaging tools and post-event documentation.[1] Dataminr's First Alert technology is used by first responders, such as those helping to provide aid during natural disasters and other emergency events.[2][3]

Dataminr employs around 800 people and is headquartered in New York.[4] The company has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Bozeman, and Seattle, as well as London, England, Dublin, Ireland, Melbourne, Australia, and Copenhagen, Denmark.[5]

History

Dataminr was founded in 2009 by Yale University graduates Ted Bailey, Sam Hendel and Jeff Kinsey. Dataminr came to wider notice when it issued an alert that Osama bin Laden had been killed 23 minutes faster than major news organizations.[6]

In 2014, Datamnr entered into a partnership with CNN and Twitter, resulting in Dataminr for News, a tool to "alert journalists to information that’s emerging on Twitter in real time."[7]

On December 30, 2019, Dataminr claimed to have detected the first signals of the COVID-19 outbreak within public social media posts.[citation needed] The company went on to detect clusters indicating future spikes in 14 different US states.[8] Seven days later, all 14 states were hit hard by the coronavirus.[8] Dataminr partnered with the UN in May 2019 to equip thousands of UN personnel with Dataminr's First Alert product for the public sector.[5][9]

Dataminr's social media intelligence contract for the FBI was taken over by Zerofox at the end of 2020.[10]

On the morning of January 5, 2021, Dataminr allegedly warned Capitol security officials of troubling online public chatter that would soon become the January 6 riot.[2]

In July 2021, Dataminr conducted its first M&A transaction when it acquired WatchKeeper, a UK-based geovisualization platform.[11] In the acquisition, Dataminr combined WatchKeeper's geovisualized data layers with its Pulse platform to provide context around events. A few months later, in October 2021, Dataminr acquired Krizo, a real-time crisis response platform based in Copenhagen, Denmark.[12]

Controversies

Surveillance of law-abiding abortion rights protests

According to reports from The Intercept, Dataminr has provided social media surveillance on lawful, constitutionally-protected pro-abortion rights protests to the US Marshals.[13]

Surveillance of racial justice protests

In 2020, The Intercept released a report that police departments used Dataminr services for surveillance during the George Floyd protests, including accessing social media posts about protest locations and actions. As written in the article, "The monitoring seems at odds with claims from both Twitter and Dataminr that neither company would engage in or facilitate domestic surveillance following a string of 2016 controversies."[14] Twitter claimed that the company was just "news alerting."[15] In response to the article, Dataminr clarified that "First Alert identifies breaking news events without any regard to the racial or ethnic composition of an area where a breaking news event occurs. … Race, ethnicity, or any other demographic characteristic of the people posting public social media posts about events is never part of determining whether a breaking news alert is sent to First Alert clients."[16] It also said that "First Alert does not enable any type of geospatial analysis. First Alert provides no feature or function that allows a user to analyze the locations of specific social media posts, social media users or plot social media posts on a map."[16]

False Reports Generated By Dataminr

On October 22, 2023, U.S. Central Command announced that a recent notification sent out over the DATAMINR “First Alert” Network, used by the U.S. Military and Intelligence Agencies, stating that a number of American servicemembers had been killed by a strike on Al-Asad Airbase in Western Iraq, was totally false.[1]

References

  1. ^ Knowles, Catherine (April 11, 2022). "Dataminr adds advanced capabilities to risk solution". IT Brief Australia.
  2. ^ a b Cohen, Zachary; Wild, Whitney (April 28, 2021). "Internal emails reveal Capitol security officials dismissed warnings about troubling social media posts before January 6 riot". CNN.
  3. ^ Tan, Gillian (March 15, 2021). "Dataminr to Discuss Funding at Over $3.6 Billion Valuation". Bloomberg.
  4. ^ Yu, Roger (January 29, 2014). "Dataminr, Twitter unveil early news detection tool". USA Today.
  5. ^ a b D'Onfro, Jillian (September 17, 2019). "AI 50: America's Most Promising Artificial Intelligence Companies". Forbes.
  6. ^ "Dataminr, Twitter unveil early news detection tool". USA Today. Archived from the original on 2022-10-26.
  7. ^ Ha, Anthony (January 29, 2014). "CNN And Twitter Partner With Dataminr To Create News Tool For Journalists". TechCrunch.
  8. ^ a b Tangermann, Victor. "Data Firm Says Its AI Predicts Where Next COVID-19 Spike Will Be". Retrieved 10 March 2021.
  9. ^ Vacarelu, Felicia (July 1, 2019). "UN Global Pulse, Dataminr Partnership Equips UN Teams with AI Tech to Keep Abreast of Crises". United Nations Global Pulse.
  10. ^ Aaron C. Davis (31 October 2021). "Warnings of violence before Jan. 6 precipitated the Capitol riot". Washington Post. Retrieved 31 October 2021. On the last weekend of 2020, the FBI lost access to Dataminr,... But the end-of-the-year changeover limited the FBI's understanding of what was happening online at a key juncture
  11. ^ Ha, Anthony (January 29, 2014). "Dataminr's first ever acquisition is UK-based geovisualization platform WatchKeeper". TechCrunch.
  12. ^ Cotton, Barney (October 15, 2021). "Dataminr acquires real-time crisis response platform Krizo". Business Leader.
  13. ^ Biddle, Sam (May 15, 2023). "U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr". The Intercept. Retrieved 2023-05-15.
  14. ^ Biddle, Sam (2020-07-09). "Police Surveilled George Floyd Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr". The Intercept. Retrieved 2020-07-12.
  15. ^ "Twitter Says Its Partner Dataminr Wasn't Surveilling Protests for Local Cops, Just 'News Alerting'". Gizmodo. 9 July 2020. Retrieved 2020-07-12.
  16. ^ a b Biddle, Sam (October 21, 2020). "Twitter Surveillance Startup Targets Communities of Color for Police". The Intercept.
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