[Vision2020] A quick rant about the term "metadata"

[Paul Rumelhart]

It's OK if they pay for it, but not if they force them to give it over?  
Are you OK with all the companies we do business with selling all our 
data to the government, or do you draw a line somewhere?

Paul

On 07/04/2013 10:08 AM, Scott Dredge wrote:
> The term 'metadata' bugs you.  What bugs me is that this 'valuable data' is being sucked
> up by the NSA 'wholesale' instead of the telcos charging them a pretty penny for it.
> The whole mess seems to be creating a lot of bugging.
>
> -Scott
>
>
> Paul wrote:
>
> As a computer science guy, this bugs me.
>   
> I've seen the term "metadata" abused in the news media and online often
> in relation to phone data the NSA is sucking up wholesale.
>   
> "Metadata", as the media is using the term, *is* data.  Things like
> phone numbers, dates, times, duration of calls, cell phone tower
> identifiers, etc *is* data.
>   
> The term "metadata" has a specific meaning, it's data about data. For
> example, metadata on the data that Verizon was forced to give over would
> look something like this:
>   
> Field                     Data Type  Size  Comment
> Originating Phone Number  NUMBER     10
> Called Number             NUMBER     10
> Call Duration             NUMBER     4      Length of call in seconds
> Date of Call              CHAR       10     Date format: MM/DD/YYYY
> Time of Call              CHAR       12     Time format: HH24:MI:SS.nnn
> ...
>   
> And so on.  I couldn't care less if they grabbed the metadata from all
> the phone carriers.  It would be a bunch of database table descriptions.
>   
> Don't kid yourself, what they grabbed from the telcos was actual data,
> and valuable data at that.
>   
> Paul
>   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20130704/dc2f586c/attachment.html>