What is metadata — and why should you care?

While we doing our homework for the ShazzleMaIL article, we saw a link to a white paper on Metadata. If you’re anything like us, you never gave metadata a second thought. While we knew what metadata was, we never knew how much information it carries and how it can be used. What we learned was disturbing and enlightening. We’ve always believed in learning everything we can about everything we do. Metadata kind of slipped past a lot of us, but when the truth is revealed, metadata is another assault on our privacy.

Metadata is the data behind the data. In the digital images you take, each picture has metadata which reveal several things about the image and who took it. It can reveal the type of camera, the ASA setting, the lens focal length, the aperature settings, the time, the date, and sometimes the approximate location of where the photo was taken. But other digital files have metadata too, including, but not limited to emails and cellphone calls.

We found this article on ShazzleMail and want to share it with you. The more you know the more you realize our privacy is being taken from us and so few of us care. We are tracked, followed, collated, and recorded, and served up to advertisers for the right price.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but like almost everything else it can be used for good and evil, and it is being use to take away or constitional right to privacy and our right to the expectation of privacy.

Read this from ShazzleMail about Metadata and you’ll learn some very disturbing facts you may have never known before:

Metadata Defined

Metadata is commonly referred to as ‘data about data.’ For an email, metadata would include the identities of the sender and receiver, the send and receive date and time, cc or bcc recipients, and a subject line if included. For a cell phone call, metadata would include numbers dialed, length of the call, date, time and geolocation of both parties.

Why is it important? When collected, this data can be analyzed for patterns and trends. Thomas Drake wrote in The Guardian, “The problem is that in the digital space, metadata becomes the index for content. And content is gold for determining intent.”

A recent New York Times editorial had this to say about what metadata can reveal, “…intimate details about a person’s lifestyle and beliefs – political leanings and associations, medical issues, sexual orientation, habits of religious worship and even
marital infidelities.”…

Please take a little and read the rest of this article from ShazzleMail http://goo.gl/bOFjZ8 .