PublicSonar FAQ

PublicSonar helps to find information that is freely available on open social media and other public sources on the internet. This is information that says something about what people experience or see. Because the number of messages on this is overwhelming, our clients use PublicSonar. With PublicSonar they find the right and relevant messages within this vast amount.

PublicSonar is used by organisations that perform a public task and want to do their job better. The users of PublicSonar are mainly looking for information about what is happening in the here and now. This allows them to respond faster and better. They decide themselves what information they want to find with PublicSonar.

PublicSonar is used to identify risks or to get a better view of an incident or a certain situation or about the service in general. It is about cases that we all have to deal with in everyday life: safety, mobility or other necessities in life such as having drinking water. It can be about weather conditions, nuisance, violence, accidents, crowds, quality of drinking water etc.

PublicSonar has been developed for obtaining real-time insights from open sources on the internet. PublicSonar is not used for investigative or detective work. Also, with PublicSonar you cannot perform social network analyses or systematically build a profile of specific people. PublicSonar is therefore, not a surveillance or digital investigation tool.

First of all, by adhering to the laws and regulations. We are just as responsible for that as our clients are. However, the law and regulations, such as the GDPR, are not the only thing we adhere to. On the open internet a lot happens with data, we actively follow that to ask ourselves, regardless of laws and regulations, whether we are careful enough.

With PublicSonar you can only collect public information that is visible to everyone, everywhere and always. We retrieve the username and the message itself from public messages, but we do not retrieve background information about the profile (bio information). In addition, we do not retrieve meta data about how a message spreads or how and with whom the message is shared. We do not, in principle, offer access to private messages or to information from closed sources. If an account is marked as private by users as private or if an author uses a closed social network, our service has no access.

The personal data found with PublicSonar are only used for the reason for which they were collected. We therefore, do not ‘create’ new information. If we use data to improve things in our technology, we ensure that this happens as prescribed by the GDPR.

The data are safe within PublicSonar. Throughout our entire organization and technology, we have taken measures to protect both the data and our technology. For this, we are certified, but we also let ourselves be checked, solicited and unsolicited. In addition, together with our clients, we ensure that the data are not stored any longer than necessary. Making sure that data are secure is something we permanently do.