OPM Gearing Up to Track Social Media Postings

The Office of Personnel Management or OPM is planning to expand the scope of background checks by including social media and other web based information. The agency is currently searching for a tech-friendly company to help with the process and wishes for the feature to be automated as soon as possible.

OPM’s Market Research

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OPM is currently doing market research to hire companies that can help the agency by automatically browsing the publicly available information of people on electronics. The agency wants to track the information available on the widely popular social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, information posted on blogs, updates made to photo and video sharing websites, online court orders and information stored with e-commerce websites like EBay and Amazon.

The request for a company was posted on April 8, 2016 and the agency is expecting all the interested companies to have submitted their responses by April 15, 2016.

The Requirements

The agency wants to hire only those companies that can provide full automated support and don’t have scope for human intervention at all. The companies are also expected to have the ability to search information in those web places that don’t appear in search engine results. The companies are expected to possess an identity matching algorithm that has the capacity to not return irrelevant results and get deceived by similar names.

The Collaboration

The project would be undertaken by OPM and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This was stated by an OPM spokesperson recently. It must be noted here that OPM is responsible for managing almost every employee background check, so the automation would be a big help for it.

The Aim

The aim of the project is to test whether it’s feasible to acquire social media tracking from commercial vendors or not. The initiation dates of the project are yet to be announced. The testing of the new technology would be done on 400 investigations at first.

The Expectations

This project can be called as another effort by the government agencies to use social media data in investigating the background. A number of such projects have been undertaken to date and many of them have had issues such as unclear policies and missed deadlines. It is expected that the OPM would run this project successfully without suffering any leaks or data breach like the one it suffered last year.