Stanford's MetaPhone Project: Crowdsourcing Metadata To Challenge the NSA 96
An anonymous reader writes "'When the first NSA surveillance story broke in June,' writes Dennis Fisher at Threatpost, 'most people likely had never heard the word metadata before. Even some security and privacy experts weren't sure what the term encompassed.' The NSA and its supporters have, of course, emphasized that phone records collection is 'not surveillance.' Researchers at Stanford are now crowdsourcing data to incontrovertibly establish just how much the NSA knows. 'Phone metadata is inherently revealing,' says a study author. 'We want to rigorously prove it—for the public, for Congress, and for the courts.' If you have an Android phone and a Facebook account, you can grab the MetaPhone app on Google Play."
Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere (Score:5, Informative)
This post titled Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere is very insightful (and very basic in terms of collected data compared to phone metadata):
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ [kieranhealy.org]
There's a previous and more mathematically detailed analysis of the same data here (the author above didn't know about this analysis until after publishing, but the link above is a much easier read):
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/ps269/han.pdf [ucla.edu]
Stanford Researcher - Glad to Answer Questions (Score:4, Informative)
I'm one of the Stanford researchers working on the MetaPhone project. Way cool that we made
Some additional details are available at metaphone.me [metaphone.me]. I would be glad to answer questions.
Best,
Jonathan
Re:Stanford Researcher - Glad to Answer Questions (Score:2, Informative)
As for the data, we recognize that participants are placing their trust in us. We have committed to securing the data and deleting it once the study is complete.
Re:Stanford Researcher - Glad to Answer Questions (Score:1, Informative)
Your app requires a Facebook account. Please change that. Nearly everyone that has an android phone also has a Google account. Please make that an option.
We're using Facebook for structured social network data, not single sign-on like the Google/Facebook/Twitter/OpenID/etc. options offered by some websites and apps.