Last fall, a federal court ruling revealed that CSIS, Canada’s CIA analog, operated a secret metadata collection program for a decade, collecting metadata in all information—time stamps, locations, names and numbers. This interesting information came from Motherboard in their article, “How Metadata Can Reveal What Your Job Is.”
As if metadata didn’t already have a bad reputation, another invasion of privacy causes demands for more transparency when it comes to government security and data measures.
It is important to remember that the metadata is what is being tracked and collected. Metadata contains the breadcrumbs of where and when, not details of content. However, regardless of future applications, it’s clear that metadata is never “just” metadata—it contains everything a determined person needs to find out all sorts of things about your life.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
