Riot being used to track someone on Google Earth.

Using Riot it is possible to gain a picture of a person's life - their friends, the places they visit charted on a map - in little more than a few clicks of a button.

In the video obtained by the Guardian, Raytheon's "principal investigator" Brian Urch explains that photographs which users post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details - automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called "exif header data". Riot pulls out this information, showing the location at which the pictures were taken. Riot can display online associations and relationships using Twitter and Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited and the times at which they visited them.

Mining from public websites for law enforcement is considered legal in most countries. But, Ginger McCall, a lawyer at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said the Raytheon technology raised concerns about how user data could be covertly collected without oversight or regulation.

"Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search."