Metadata is harmless / myLot

Shingle Springs, California

January 10, 2014 12:08pm CST

Or is it? I found this very interesting: Two graduate students at MIT put together a tool that will analyze the metadata from someone's e-mail communications and chart out who they are communicating with and how that changes over time. Without even touching the actual content of the e-mails they can learn a lot about you. Still think it's OK for the government to be collecting this information on you without a warrant?

Think Metadata Isn't Intrusive? Read This

www.commondreams.org

Friday, January 10, 2014 Search Home EMAIL SIGN UP! Most Popular This Week More... More... Popular content Today's Top News As Predators Vanish, Ecosystems Thrown Off Balance: Scientists Trove of Emails, Other Documents in Christie Scandal Set for R

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1 response

topffer

@topffer (42155)

• France

12 Jan 14

I read about this software long ago. What is interesting is that they use only the data available to an email service provider for their diagram. Metadata can be very intrusive, but this method has limits, giving only the number of times X wrote to Y or Z and received emails from Y/Z : they don't learn a lot about you, and if you split your mail by using several email addresses, the conclusions will be wrong if they don't analyze traffic from all addresses. Metadata included in .doc or .pdf files can be a lot more dangerous for our privacy, and we have to be watchful about this when we send a document.