Trending Science: US researchers find that even basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information

A major study from Stanford University has shown how details taken from telephone metadata by the US National Security Agency (NSA) pose a real threat to citizens’ privacy.

The notion of ‘metadata’ did not truly enter public consciousness until 2013, following Edward Snowden’s revelations that the NSA has harvested vast amounts of it from personal telephone calls, subsequently causing major political alarm on both sides of the Atlantic with regards to individual privacy. The US Administration stated in 2013, following the revelations, that metadata harvesting ‘does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls.’

To verify whether this claim is true, a team of computer scientists from Stanford University have been collecting metadata themselves, where they were able to uncover potentially very sensitive information about some individuals. The results of the study have been published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.’

Unlike the NSA, the researchers collected their data with the consent from over 800 people who downloaded an Android app called MetaData. Once installed on a smartphone, it collects the phone numbers and timing of every call and text message made and received. The app also received information from participants’ Facebook accounts, which the team used as a means to verify the accuracy of their results. The researchers worked on the assumption that if participants’ data was truly secure and their privacy protected, the records of their 1.2 million text messages and 250 000 calls should reveal very little.

By using public information and cheap commercial databases to map the phone numbers to businesses, organisations and social media profiles, they were able to work out 82 % of individuals’ names, where they lived, as well as who their partners are. However they were also able to collect even more personal information. They pinpointed calls made to and from a list of organisations, including hospitals, pharmacies, religious groups, legal services, firearms retailers and sex establishments. This allowed them to piece together extraordinarily detailed pictures of people’s everyday lives – one man was found to own a rifle, another had been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat, one woman had recently become pregnant, and they uncovered an individual who was preparing to grow cannabis.

The results highlight the power of telephone metadata to provide extremely accurate details of people’s lives, especially as the data is not subject to the same legal protections that cover the consent of people’s communications. As a result, metadata has long been recognised by security services for effectively gathering intelligence.

Patrick Mutchler, a computer security researcher at Stanford stated that whilst the power of metadata was clearly understood by those gathering it, the general public had a poor perception on its implications due to there being so few studies conducted on the issue, making it difficult for people to effectively fight to protect their privacy. ‘Now we have hard evidence we can point to that didn’t exist in the past,’ he commented.

The researchers believe that their findings will have important implications for future policymaking in the field of privacy. ‘Large-scale metadata surveillance programmes, like the NSA’s, will necessarily expose highly confidential information about ordinary citizens,’ the research team wrote. ‘To strike an appropriate balance between national security and civil liberties, future policymaking must be informed by input from relevant sciences.

Source: http://cordis.europa.eu/news/rcn/125359_en.html?isPermaLink=true?WT.mc_i...