老澳门开奖结果

You've probably heard politicians or pundits say that 鈥渕etadata doesn't matter.鈥� They argue that police and intelligence agencies shouldn't need probable cause warrants to collect information about our communications. Metadata isn鈥檛 all that revealing, they say, it鈥檚 just numbers.

But the digital metadata trails you leave behind every day say more about you than you can imagine. Now, thanks to two MIT students, you don't have to imagine鈥攁t least with respect to your email.

Deepak Jagdish and Daniel Smilkov's program maps your life, using your email account. After you give the researchers access to your email metadata鈥攏ot the content, just the time and date stamps, and 鈥淭o鈥� and 鈥淐c鈥� fields鈥攖hey鈥檒l return to you a series of maps and graphs that will blow your mind. The program will remind you of former loves, illustrate the changing dynamics of your professional and personal networks over time, mark deaths and transitions in your life, and more. You鈥檒l probably learn something new about yourself, if you study it closely enough. (The students say they delete your data on your command.)

Whether or not you grant the program access to your data, watch the video embedded below to see Jagdish and Smilkov show illustrations from Immersion and talk about what they discerned about themselves from looking at their own metadata maps. While you鈥檙e watching, remember that while the NSA and FBI are collecting our phone records in bulk, and using advanced computer algorithms to make meaning from them, state and local government officials can often also get this information .

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When President Obama that the phone surveillance program 鈥渋sn鈥檛 about鈥� 鈥渓istening to your telephone calls,鈥� he was deflecting attention from the terrifying fact that there鈥檚 nothing currently stopping the government from amassing and data-mining every scrap of metadata in the world about us. He made it sound like metadata spying isn't a big deal, when it's pretty much the golden ticket.

Metadata surveillance is extremely powerful, and we are all subject to it, constantly. If you want to see something resembling what the NSA sees when it looks at your data, give Jagdish and Smilkov鈥檚 program a try. Then tell the government: get a warrant.

See also this post on Immersion by the 老澳门开奖结果's Matt Harwood.

This is an edited version of a post first published on the 老澳门开奖结果 of Massachusetts' blog.