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Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defense contractor, created software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behavior from collecting data from all social networking websites. This technology, called Riot (Rapid Information Overlay Technology), has the ability to pull all of someone’s personal information they have posted online and compile it into one big file, then allowing it to produce an extremely accurate estimate at where that person will be next and when.

Riot pulls its information from websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. With Riot it is possible to get an entire snapshot of a person’s life, including their friends, places they visit on a map and more, just with a few clicks. In a video obtained by The Guardian, Brian Urch, Raytheon’s principle investigator, explains how the program works by using an employee Nick. Riot can create a spider-like diagram showing all of Nick’s relationships, and show that he is frequently at the gym at 6 a.m. during the week.  Urch also explains how some of the location data is found: photos. Some pictures that people post contain latitude and longitude details are automatically embedded by smartphones within “exif header data.”

 This technology has not been sold to any individual clients. However, it has been shared with U.S. government as a part of joint research and development effort in 2010, in order to help build a national security system capable of analyzing entities from cyberspace—which means this technology has been out there, unknown, for a while. The information that the technology created was just released to the public through the video narrated by Urch. Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon’s intelligence and information department, said in an email: “Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation’s rapidly hanging security needs.”

 This software brings up the age old issue of online privacy concerns. Many users of social media networks have settings that only allow friends to see what they post. Riot can take that information anyway, and it could be showed to government officials. Earlier this year the FBI stated that it was “developing a social media monitoring application,” but insisted that it would protect the privacy of individuals and protected groups before it was used.