Geofeedia Founded to Enable Location-Based Social Media Surveillance

Geofeedia was founded in Chicago by Phil Harris, Mike Mulroy, and Scott Mitchell to provide location-based social media monitoring software. The platform used algorithms to isolate publicly available geotagging data from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other social channels, allowing users to monitor posts and photos based on specific geographic locations. The company specialized in serving corporate security teams, law enforcement agencies, media organizations, and marketing departments, positioning itself as a tool for “situational awareness” and “threat detection.”

The company received significant early-stage funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, marking it as part of a broader intelligence community investment strategy in social media surveillance capabilities. This CIA connection would later become controversial when the company’s law enforcement surveillance activities targeting political activists were exposed. Geofeedia’s customer base grew to include Fortune 500 companies like McDonald’s and Dell, news outlets including AP, BBC, and CNN, and approximately 500 police departments and law enforcement agencies nationwide.

The platform’s core technology allowed real-time monitoring of social media activity within user-defined geographic boundaries, enabling what critics would later describe as mass surveillance of constitutionally protected speech and assembly. While marketed as a tool for emergency response and corporate brand monitoring, the technology’s most significant adoption came from law enforcement agencies seeking to monitor protests, demonstrations, and activist organizing activities. The company’s founding represented an early convergence of social media data mining, geolocation technology, and government surveillance infrastructure that would define debates about digital privacy and First Amendment rights throughout the 2010s.