Public, profiled, and unprotected: How OSINT, AI and Geolocation blur the line between privacy and surveillance
Synopsis
As AI-assisted search and OSINT tools become increasingly available, the barrier between lawful surveillance and dangerous public profiling is vanishing. In this panel, a lawyer, an AI engineer, and a cyber security OSINT expert will demonstrate how open-source tools can now be used to accurately identify, geolocate, and digitally track individuals—without breaching a single law.
We’ll walk attendees through real-world, live scenarios that show how seemingly innocent public information—combined with facial recognition services, social media metadata, LLM-based inference, and location signals from mobile adtech—can triangulate a person’s identity and habits in minutes.
The key problem? This isn’t necessarily illegal.
We’ll challenge the audience to consider:
From a legal and policy lens, we’ll show how current privacy laws are inadequate because they treat data points individually, not relationally.
From a technical side, we’ll examine how LLMs and geolocation APIs enable rapid, inferential profiling. From an OSINT perspective, we’ll demonstrate how anyone—not just state actors—can leverage these tools right now.
We’ll conclude with: