My Life in Circles: Why Metadata is Incredibly Intimate

[JDPriestly]

8. Absolutely correct. A lot of this information is available if you pay for it.

The metadata the government is collecting is far more revealing.

I doubt that Obama has thought much about it really. But it is an awful program. It would prevent union organizing if employers had access to this data.

We need to tighten our laws that protect our privacy not only to protect our privacy from the government but from private parties like our neighbors and our employers.

It is already very easy to find out a lot about people just from a Google search of their name. Try Googling your own name. If you are on Facebook or Linked In or any other similar website you are even more transparent. We have not choice about having more transparency about our lives than ever before, but the government can find out enough about us just from Google searches. Collecting our metadata is way, way overboard.

People do not have a clue as to what this means. They defend it because they don't understand it at all. But this is a horrendous program.

I remember looking a couple of people up on fairly common programs and discovering things out about them that I might have preferred not to have learned. Really. Your metadata reveals strange things about you -- and not all of the conclusions that can be drawn from your metadata are true.