Why the Collection of Phone Meta Data Matters

[BillT]

Contrary to what the spooks say, anonymous meta data can lead to an individual's identification:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/your-call-and-text-records-are-far-more-revealing-you-think?utm_campaign=news_daily_2016-05-16&et_rid=33537079&et_cid=491753

[LizStreithorst]

How lovely for us

[Mugwump]

Contrary to what the spooks say, anonymous meta data can lead to an individual's identification:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/your-call-and-text-records-are-far-more-revealing-you-think?utm_campaign=news_daily_2016-05-16&et_rid=33537079&et_cid=491753

It seems the NSA and the scientists both got most of their data from info already gleaned by others...so who should we really be more concerned about...the 'watcher'..or the 'watchee'....

"...the study found that a large proportion of their subjects were connected to each other not through personal relationships but through customer service lines, telemarketers, and two-factor authentication services such as those used by Google. Even with a two-hop limitation, an NSA analyst could in principle "hop" to an additional 25,000 people from any one individual."

[BillT]

Well, one could have concerns about at least a few possible users/abusers of this kind of information:

government (in a general way)
businesses that get a lot of information from their sources (maybe cookies and info from how you use their sites ((Dennis probably knows more about this than me))
crooks who get info from involuntarily loaded spy apps.
other governments acting like crooks

The scientists would not be much of a concern to me since they got their use data from apps that were voluntarily loaded by (presumably) knowledgeable test users. They are also publicly funded and could not get funding to keep something like this going (also "testing" people without their permission would get you in a lot of trouble).