What Is Metadata?

What is Metadata?

Data that provides information about other data. Information that is generated as you use technology and that lets you know the who, what, where, when and how of a variety of activities. -

Where does it come from? - - - - -

- Pages visited and when - Cookies and cached data from websites - Phone number of caller - Duration of call - User data and possibly user login details with auto-fill features - Your search queries - Phone number(s)called - Location of each - URLs - Results that appeared in searches - Unique serial numbers of participant - Your IP address, internet service provider, device hardware - Pages you visit from search phones involved - Telephone calling card details, operating system and browser version - Your name and profile biographical information Making a phone call - Time of call numbers Internet Browsing including birthday, hometown, work history and interests

- Sender's name, email and IP address - Content type and encoding - Your username and unique identifier - When you created your account - Recipient's name and email address - Mail client login records with IP address - Your subscriptions - Tweet's location, date, time and time zone - Server transfer information - Mail client header formats - Your location - Tweet's unique ID and ID of tweet replied to - Date, time and timezone - Priority and categories - Your device - Contributor IDs - Unique identifier of email and related emails - Subject of email - Activity date, time and time zone - Your followers, following and favorite count - Status of the email - Your activities, “likes”, check-ins and events - Your verification status (Message-ID) Social Networking Sending an E-mail - - Read receipt request - Language - Application sending the tweet

------What can it reveal? - And so...

Metadata is...

“Arguably more revealing [than content] because it’s actually much In many cases, courts have recognized that easier to analyze the patterns in a large universe of metadata and metadata can reveal much about an correlate them with real-world events than it is to go through a semantic

analysis of all of someone’s email and all of someone’s telephone calls.” individual and deserves privacy protection, ------while recognizing that context matters.

- Daniel Weitzner Computer scientist