Metadata: Your online identity (05:56)

Metadata: Your online identity

[wcm_restrict plans=”admin”]

Previous NSA Director Michael Hayden – We kill people on the basis of metadata

Welcome to lesson 2 topic 5: Metadata, your online identity. This lesson started out with with previous NSA director Michael Hayden saying they kill people on the basis of metadata. But what is metadata exactly? Mails, location, website visits, cellphone-calls, (whatsapp) messages, connections to cellphone towers. All these types of data that tell something about your behavior. Connect them all together and you can get a pretty significant view of someone’s life. It tells what someone is doing, with who, where and why. Compared to the data of data-brokers, metadata is way more specific on a personal level. It knows you better then you know yourself. It’s almost never wrong in it’s observations. Knowing what somebody does tells you a lot about the driving factors of this person. If you are tapping into someones cellphone calls, you know that he or she is speaking the truth.

Did you know that, since 2014, the European Union introduced the ‘Data Retention Directive’. This is obliging member states to save all the metadata they collect for at least half a year. Pedro Cruz Villalón is Advocate General of the European Court of Justice. Cruz Villalón wrote a plea against the data retention directive. Cruz Villalón wrote in his plea that metadata belongs to a special category of personal data and that it should therefore be treated as such. “The use of metadata,” he wrote, “makes it possible to create a complete and accurate picture of a person’s private identity. So you can basically say that Metadata’ is more of a technical term to hide what it’s really about – these are behavioral data.

So why did the European Union introduce this law? Well, people in higher-up positions know you can predict a society’s behaviour based on metadata. Take the American Information Scientist Alex Pentland for example. He is a member of the World Economic Forum – this is one of the most influential organizations in the world. He believes that the analysis of metadata, also called ‘social physics’, could bring a revolution to human kind.

“For the first time we will have the data necessary to really know ourselves and to understand how our society is developing,” he writes in his book Social Physics (2015). His optimism has no boundaries:’ About only one In a few years, we will likely have access to incredibly rich data on the behavior of all of humanity, on an ongoing basis. “With social physics, Pentland is thus striving for a”computational theory of behavior, “a” mathematical explanation of why society responds as she responds.”

His ambitions are therefore far-reaching. Pentland believes that with the new methods of analyzing large amounts of data, not only can human behavior be perfectly measured, as can energy and movement, but it can also be predicted and even controlled. The goal is “to develop better systems” and “plan the future more precisely,” with societies such as “living laboratories.” This is critical. Social physics is based on an ultimate feasibility ideal.