Your Metadata Reveals Quite a Bit

[marions ghost]

Anyone Brushing Off NSA Surveillance Because It's 'Just Metadata' Doesn't Know What Metadata Is
from the your-metadata-reveals-quite-a-bit dept

by Mike Masnick
Mon, Jul 8th 2013

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130708/01453123733/anyone-brushing-off-nsa-surveillance-because-its-just-metadata-doesnt-know-what-metadata-is.shtml

excerpt------------------

Just a few months ago, Nature published a study all about how much a little metadata can reveal, entitled Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility by Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, and Vincent D. Blondel. The basic conclusion: metadata reveals a ton, and even "coarse datasets" provide almost no anonymity:

A simply anonymized dataset does not contain name, home address, phone number or other obvious identifier. Yet, if individual's patterns are unique enough, outside information can be used to link the data back to an individual. For instance, in one study, a medical database was successfully combined with a voters list to extract the health record of the governor of Massachusetts. In another, mobile phone data have been re-identified using users' top locations. Finally, part of the Netflix challenge dataset was re-identified using outside information from The Internet Movie Database.

All together, the ubiquity of mobility datasets, the uniqueness of human traces, and the information that can be inferred from them highlight the importance of understanding the privacy bounds of human mobility. We show that the uniqueness of human mobility traces is high and that mobility datasets are likely to be re-identifiable using information only on a few outside locations. Finally, we show that one formula determines the uniqueness of mobility traces providing mathematical bounds to the privacy of mobility data. The uniqueness of traces is found to decrease according to a power function with an exponent that scales linearly with the number of known spatio-temporal points. This implies that even coarse datasets provide little anonymity.

Some of the figures they presented show how easy it is to track individuals and their locations, which can paint a pretty significant and revealing portrait of who they are and what they've done.
In an interview, one of the authors of the paper basically said that your metadata effectively creates a "fingerprint" that is unique to you and easy to match to your identity:

"We use the analogy of the fingerprint," said de Montjoye in a phone interview today. "In the 1930s, Edmond Locard, one of the first forensic science pioneers, showed that each fingerprint is unique, and you need 12 points to identify it. So here what we did is we took a large-scale database of mobility traces and basically computed the number of points so that 95 percent of people would be unique in the dataset." ........

More at link...http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130708/01453123733/anyone-brushing-off-nsa-surveillance-because-its-just-metadata-doesnt-know-what-metadata-is.shtml

[Cleita]

1. I sure those of us who regularly visit DU and have done so for years probably have

big fat files on us and everything we do and where we go.