I never thought the term “metadata” would
figure prominently in the news. But then I never thought normal people would
have the word “Bluetooth” in their vocabulary either. People are referring to metadata because
they want to draw distinctions between different kinds of processing. So, the
time and date you made a phone call are metadata. The content of your call
would be data.
Metadata is “data about data”. In a shrewd post, Jewel Ward points out that while being an accurate translation of the term, this is in reality pretty vague. And, importantly, one person's metadata is another person's data. For example, metadata pertaining to phones used by Paula Broadwell and General David Petraeus becomes data as soon as you put it together and draw some conclusions about the actions of the owners.
This use of metadata as data has a long
history. Much of the evidence in court cases is metadata – establishing the
location of the accused is a prime example, as is fixing the time of an event. So, we should be wary of claims that “we're
only using metadata”. Metadata is data too. Taming Data
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