Privacy Among Metadata

June 17, 2015 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Privacy Among Metadata

Australia recently passed data retention laws that force telecommunications companies to retain some types of phone and web metadata. This data can be requested by government agencies and, in fact, has been used to investigate leaks of government information to journalists. Even though it takes a warrant to access a journalist’s metadata to identify a source, this offers little protection. To prove this point, The Guardian developed a simple game to visualize the problems and challenges.

There is a lot of discussion happening around this new law. It is important to remember that though Internet providers and and mobile phone networks will now be required to store customers’ metadata (the sender, recipient, and time of emails and calls), it doesn’t include the content of an email or telephone call.

Melody K. Smith

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.