Stanford Quantifies the Privacy-Stripping Power of Metadata
May 17th, 2016Via: Tech Crunch:
More proof, if proof were needed, of the privacy-stripping power of metadata. A multi-year crowdsourced study, conducted by Stanford scientists and published this week, underlines how much information can be inferred from basic phone logs cross-referenced with other public datasets.
(Reminder: the former director of the NSA and the CIA, General Michael Hayden, has asserted: “We kill people based on metadata” — which suggests rock solid confident in the inferences that spy agencies are able to draw from metadata. Hayden reiterated this point in an on stage interview last week at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. “Metadata’s incredibly powerful,” he said. “Metadata shouldn’t get a free pass.”)
The research paper, entitled Evaluating the privacy properties of telephone metadata, details how the scientists investigated what they describe as the “factual assumptions that undergird policies of differential treatment for content and metadata”, underlining how easily they were able to generate detailed intelligence from metadata.
Their study is based on crowdsourced telephone metadata from more than 800 volunteers (using an Android app to pull the relevant metadata off the participants’ phones) cross-referenced with social networking information and other public data sets, such as Yelp and Google Places.
“We find that telephone metadata is densely interconnected, susceptible to reidentification, and enables highly sensitive inferences,” the paper authors write.
Related: Hemisphere: A Massive Drug Enforcement Database Containing Decades of Telephone Metadata
