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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Wednesday, July 3, 2013
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Redux: Metadata Matters Posted by Sean @ 10:53 GMT

The term "metadata" is nothing new to us. One year ago, we linked to the story of German Green party politician, Malte Spitz.

Given current events, a refresher on just what metadata is seems useful. From our June 29, 2012 post:

"A 2008 German law required all telecommunications providers with more than 10,000 customers to retain six months worth of data on all calls, messages and connections. Germany's Constitutional Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 2010.

Spitz acquired (meta)data from his telecom provider covering a period from August 2009 to February 2010. Zeit Online has made the raw data available via Google Docs. To demonstrate just how much of a personal profile can be crafted, Zeit Online augmented the data with publicly available information such as Spitz's tweets and blog entries."

(Meta)data or metadata… it's all data.

Anyway, the result is an incredibly cool, very revealing, interactive map:

Vorratsdatenspeicherung
Source: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

Now you can hear Spitz himself…

PRI's The World interviewed Spitz yesterday on its July 2nd broadcast.



Also of interest, from Geoffrey Nunberg: Calling It "Metadata" Doesn't Make Surveillance Less Intrusive