Last year, when the Snowden leaks started dripping into the mainstream media, the apologists of the National Security Police State and Surveillance Society went to great lengths to downplay the fact of the illegal surveillance, arguing that "It's just metadata! Nothing to see here!" An article in
the Guardian reports on a study that reveals just how much about a person can be inferred from their metadata:
Identities of cannabis grower, woman seeking an abortion and MS sufferer
inferred in study that confirms danger of widespread access to metadata . . .
Warnings that phone call “metadata” can betray detailed information
about your life has been confirmed by research at Stanford University.
Researchers there successfully identified a cannabis cultivator,
multiple sclerosis sufferer and a visitor to an abortion clinic using
nothing more than the timing and destination of their phone calls.
Jonathan
Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, the researchers behind the finding, used
data gleaned from 546 volunteers to assess the extent to which
information about who they had called and when revealed personally
sensitive information.
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