Metadata continues to be ambiguously and sometimes not so ambiguously tied to dark and dastardly deeds. Between the National Security Agency (NSA) and their monitoring metadata from phones, email and who knows what for “security” measures and the fear of personal information/identity theft, metadata has a hard time coming out of this unscathed. In the end, metadata is just data about data. Its use or misuse is the responsibility of the user, not the mechanism by which it was delivered.
Now the German spy agency, “Bundesnachrichtendienst”, intends to improve its technological methods in order to be able to systematically analyze blogs, online forums, and portals, such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, where messages, pictures and further data are exchanged. This interesting information came to us from Ground Report in their article, “German spies will systematically monitor Facebook and Twitter accounts as part of its metadata collection project.”
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
