Stanford's MetaPhone Project: Crowdsourcing Metadata To Challenge the NSA

An anonymous reader writes "'When the first NSA surveillance story broke in June,' writes Dennis Fisher at Threatpost, 'most people likely had never heard the word metadata before. Even some security and privacy experts weren't sure what the term encompassed.' The NSA and its supporters have, of course, emphasized that phone records collection is 'not surveillance.' Researchers at Stanford are now crowdsourcing data to incontrovertibly establish just how much the NSA knows. 'Phone metadata is inherently revealing,' says a study author. 'We want to rigorously prove it—for the public, for Congress, and for the courts.' If you have an Android phone and a Facebook account, you can grab the MetaPhone app on Google Play."

Comments

So let me get this straight...

[bobbied]

You are releasing an ANDROID app that allows me to volunteer to send you all my metadata? Um, not just no. Heck NO!

It's bad enough that the NSA gets it from my carrier and that Google gets loads of data from me every time I use the search feature on my phone, but even to make a point I'm NOT going to sign up and let some yahoos (um.. classical usage, not the company) track everything they want about my handset.

You people must be nuts... I've gone to great lengths to skim off all the stuff my carrier packed into the phone in the first place, I'm not going to waste my space, battery and data on this.