Your call and text records are far more revealing than you think

ScienceMag.org ^ | 15 May, 2016 | John Bohannon

[MtnClimber]

Metadata. It's an obscure data science term that was unknown to most people until 2013, when they learned that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is harvesting vast amounts of it from telephone calls. Government officials have downplayed the sensitivity of such data, but a crowdsourced study of phone metadata now finds that highly revealing information can be gleaned from a simple list of who called whom.

NSA's intrusion into citizen's private lives may have roiled academics, but it has remained unclear what the spy agency was learning from phone metadata. A White House spokesperson reassured the public in 2013 that the metadata harvesting "does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls," leaving privacy intact. Ever since then, a trio of computer scientists from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California—Jonathan Mayer, Patrick Mutchler, and John Mitchell—has been harvesting phone metadata themselves to see what can be revealed.

Unlike NSA, the researchers collected their data with consent from people who downloaded an app called MetaPhone. Once installed on a smart phone, it collects the phone numbers and timing of every call and text message made and received. More than 800 people downloaded the app and consented. If their privacy really is protected, then the records of their 1.2 million text messages and 250,000 calls should reveal little.

In fact, the metadata revealed quite a lot. By using public information and cheap commercial databases to map phone numbers to businesses, organizations, and social media profiles, metadata revealed the location and identity of most of the people, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Even deeply private details such as chronic health problems, religious affiliations, and drug use emerged by simply linking people to various clinics, stores, and organizations through their call records.

[MtnClimber]

Free Republic users are probably on the lists of the leftists.

[BipolarBob]

WE’re on Hillarys hitlist for sure.

[ClearCase_guy]

Fortunately, the government can’t actually find anyone’s email.

Right?

[MtnClimber]

Lots of really bad people got lots more than Hillary’s metadata.

[BipolarBob]

Fortunately, the government can’t actually find anyone’s email.

You got a multi-million dollar trust fund and influential aides you can trust to make the drop-offs?

[Svartalfiar]

Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere

I will simply start at the very beginning and follow a technique laid out in a beautiful paper by my brilliant former colleague, Mr Ron Breiger, called “The Duality of Persons and Groups.”

...

We did not start with a “social networke” as you might ordinarily think of it, where individuals are connected to other individuals. We started with a list of memberships in various organizations. But now suddenly we do have a social networke of individuals, where a tie is defined by co-membership in an organization.

...

From a table of membership in different groups we have gotten a picture of a kind of social network between individuals, a sense of the degree of connection between organizations, and some strong hints of who the key players are in this world. And all this—all of it!—from the merest sliver of metadata about a single modality of relationship between people.

[BenLurkin]

[Opinionated Blowhard]

All you have to do is watch one of those Investigation Discovery programs to know that, if you kill your husband or wife and text your lover about it, the police will be able to pull about a year’s worth of your text messages from cell phone records and nail you for it.

[This_far]

probably on lot’s of lists

(my credit score is zero... finally)

[AllAmericanGirl44]

bkmk