prestia / maderradar

Using publicly available data and a few co-conspirators, @maderradar is a crowd-sourced tracking mechanism for a single individual.

@maderradar

What is this?

@maderradar explores the nature of privacy in a time when almost everyone has a camera in their pocket and the ability to share information with thousands. Using publicly available data and a few co-conspirators, @maderradar is effectively a crowd-sourced tracking mechanism for a single individual, Jason Mader. This is also my first twitter bot.

Requirements:

• Twitter gem
• Geokit gem

How To Use:

• Clone this repo and edit the settings in keys.rb.example.
• Setup cron jobs to run maderradar.rb at relatively frequent intervals.
• Prepare to annoy the world with 2x the #maderradar notifications!!
• Actually, please don't do that.

Gist:

• maderradar.rb searches twitter for every instance of the #maderradar tag since the last tweet.
• When a new tweet containing #maderradar is seen, the script pulls any location information from the tweet and does one of the following:
• If detailed location information is provided (i.e. GPS lat/long), maderradar.rb does a lookup with GeoKit and tweets the location of Mader in the following format: Mader spotted by @<user> near <address or name of location>. Find him on a map: <link_to_google_maps>
• If rough location information is provided (i.e. city & state), maderradar.rb tweets the location of Mader in the following format: Mader spotted by @<user> in <city>, <state>. Read more: <link to original tweet>
• If no location information is provided, maderradar.rb tweets in the following format: Mader spotted by @<user>, but location information was not provided. Read more: <link to original tweet>
• When the last tweet is sent, maderradar.rb records the id of the last tweet in last_tweet.

Future:

• This was written prior to some updates to twitter's location API. I have done some updates to the code, but the reverse lookup could be done much better (and maybe without GeoKit).
• The search function currently uses the REST API. I may eventually switch this to the streaming API. I probably won't though.

License:

• You know it.

Thanks:

• To Jason Mader (@jasonmader) for being a good sport and to Alex Bookless (@BooklessBevs) for inventing the #maderradar tag.