The revelation that the National Security Agency has been collecting metadata about millions of phone calls exploded as a public issue. Is it a harmless way for the government to track dangerous patterns or a tightening net around our lives?
When Google hands over email records to different governmental agencies, it includes basic envelope information, or metadata, that reveals the names and email addresses of senders and recipients in your account.
For César Hidalgo, this national conversation about metadata couldn’t come too soon. A professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, Hidalgo has been obsessed with communications metadata for years. To him, metadata isn’t merely a technical issue, or a political one, but an emotional one—a cloud of knowledge about your behavior that, once you confront it, can literally change your life.
To make metadata more visceral, he and a group of graduate students launched a new online project to help people visualize their own metadata, or at least one small corner of it. Thanks to the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, you can now use a tool called Immersion, that asks users for their Gmail address and password; it then scans every e-mail in their accounts and scrapes the metadata to create a portrait of their personal network.
Check it out, the NSA Director, General Keith Alexander has :)
César Hidalgo (left) with Daniel Smilkov and Deepak Jagdish at the MIT Media Lab.