WEB POLICY: President Obama has emphasized that the NSA is “not looking at content.” “[T]his is just metadata,” Senator Feinstein told reporters. In dismissing the ACLU’s legal challenge, Judge Pauley shrugged off possible sensitive inferences as a “parade of horribles.”
On the other side, a number of computer scientists have expressed concern over the privacy risks posed by metadata. Ed Felten gave a particularly detailed explanation in a declaration for the ACLU: “Telephony metadata can be extremely revealing,” he wrote, “both at the level of individual calls and, especially, in the aggregate.” Holding the NSA’s program likely unconstitutional, Judge Leon credited this view and noted that “metadata from each person’s phone ‘reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’”…
We used crowdsourced data to arrive at empirical answers. Since November, we have beenconducting a study of phone metadata privacy. Participants run the MetaPhone app on their Android smartphone; it submits device logs and social network information for analysis. In previous posts, we have used the MetaPhone dataset to spot relationships, understand call graph interconnectivity, and estimate the identifiability of phone numbers… (more)
