SECURITYBy Rachael King

Companies, taking advantage of the digital detritus released by location-tracking smartphones, are finding new ways to monitor what their employees post online. By using technology that connects social media posts to their physical point of origin, companies can clamp down on intellectual property theft, establishing a new connection between cyber and physical security.

Microsoft Corp. uses a software-as-a-service platform that organizes social data by physical location, to detect the possible leaking of intellectual property. The technology,from Chicago-based Geofeedia, lets Microsoft set up a virtual net around the event space used for its annual Microsoft Global Exchange event for employees that sifts through social media content posted by attendees.

Generally speaking, employees are not intending to leak product information. “It’s just that they’ll catch a slideshow in the background of a photo and it will have information on it,” said Jake Lanum, protective intelligence program manager for third-party contractor AS Solution where he works directly with Microsoft. At that point, Microsoft will try to match the social media account with an employee and ask the person to take the post down.

“It’s a new concept in social analytics that leverages smartphones which have GPS in them,” Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris tells CIO Journal. The company primarily does geolocation social media monitoring for marketing, public safety and corporate risk and security purposes. Customers use the company’s patented technology which lets customers organize and filter social media posts by location or a series of locations. A hotel chain, for example, might be interested in content posted near the locations of its properties. A company may want to understand what’s happening in a particular location where a CEO is visiting.

“A lot of these intelligence decisions or security advisory decisions have been made on social media before but they were really reliant on keywords,” said Mr. Lanum.That approach misses slang or images that don’t use words, he said. In addition, there may be lots of people tweeting about a certain event who are not even there.

Microsoft has found other uses for the technology. In 2014, a man stormed Ottawa’s Parliament Hill shooting a soldier at Canada’s National War Memorial, just a few blocks from Microsoft’s building.

Geofeedia pulled in all public social media posts in the vicinity, mostly Twitter posts and Instagram photos. “Our building was circumnavigated by the gunman as he was making his way through,” said Mr. Lanum. “We were able to determine when our building was locked down and when the lockdown ended and with reasonable certainty we were able to determine there was only one gunman well before conventional media,” he said.

The way Microsoft Global Security is structured, the company has site security managers which work at the buildings themselves. In a much smaller region such as Ottawa, there are regional security advisors who cover a much broader area. “They don’t track everything so it’s our job to inform them what’s going on in their own region at times,” he said. In that instance, Microsoft was able to inform the security manager that employees were safe and that they were headed home. That information is also used in the C-suite to make decisions about whether work should be cancelled and what the company response should be, said Mr. Lanum.