What Does Your Metadata Reveal About You?

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.

Source:http://blog.agupieware.com/2014/03/what-does-your-metadata-reveal-about-you.html