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Stanford Researchers Spot Medical Conditions, Guns, and More In Phone Metadata
An anonymous reader writes "Since the NSA's phone metadata program broke last summer, politicians have trivialized the privacy implications. It's 'just metadata,' Dianne Feinstein and others have repeatedly emphasized. That view is no longer tenable: Stanford researchers crowdsourced phone metadata from real users, and easily identified calls to 'Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more.' Looking at patterns in call metadata, they correctly diagnosed a cardiac condition and outed an assault rifle owner. 'Reasonable minds can disagree about the policy and legal constraints,' the authors conclude. 'The science, however, is clear: phone metadata is highly sensitive.'"
It does not matter what it is describing; if it has information in it, it is "data." We should be calling it what it is. It is data about what people are doing. Calling it "metadata" only helps to obscure the issue.
Sure. There is nothing wrong with everyone knowing everything about everyone IF nobody will use such knowledge for malicious activities, nor to judge and/or segregate people into groups based on their preferences. I wouldn't mind people knowing which porn genre I prefer if they wouldn't treat me different for it. I'm sure many transsexuals wouldn't mind other people knowing that they are if people would just treat them as human beings just like any other.
The biggest issue with all information being public is that any deviation from social norm is usually met with hostility, instead of curiosity, thought, acceptance that not everyone thinks the same and that not all deviation is "bad".
It is almost worth having all my other comments nulled out just to mod this up. This is exactly the problem with information being too public. In an ideal world we would all have nothing to hide, but in reality stereotypes and biases are rampant, with plenty of people perfectly happy to make your life miserable for failing to conform to norms they hold.