My Life in Circles: Why Metadata is Incredibly Intimate

[intaglio]

9. Seriously, you need to get a sense of proportion

Metadata* is intrusive because it can reveal a lot about you if studied in bulk.

Well no sh1t, Sherlock ...

So can your credit card, so can loyalty cards, so can your traffic tickets, so can your speech patterns and so can your ZIP code. Any data about you can be so used and there are a lot of advertising companies, financial service companies and insurance companies whose businesses are based on being able to compile such data and make such analyses. Welcome to the modern world - you seem to have been missing for the past 50 years.

Now try and make it illegal to look at such data and you will stop cellphone and telephone companies, the internet and even, of your law is wide enough, the USPS from working.

So make it illegal to use such data? Well good luck with getting Google or Amazon or Costco to go along with that.

My Sigoth has pointed out:

even walking down the street you are generating a host of such information; go into a shop and buy, with cash, a magazine and a soda even that data can be used and studied in bulk, it can even be traced back to you in person;

back in the 1950s a shopkeeper would know that Mrs Brown came in every Friday for 2 loaves of Hovis and would be able to advise police searching for Mr Brown that it seemed he went missing 6 months prior to Mrs Brown's report because she has only been buying 1 loaf for the weekend for that time.

Seriously one of the advantages of a computer is that it can perform operations on vast quantities of data and that was always the intention; this is how the "Bombes" at Bletchley Park were able to make near real time decoding of Enigma possible.

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* I use metadata precisely because the complex and slightly misleading "data about data" is so cumbersome.