When Edward Snowden released classified material exposing the U.S. government's secret surveillance program, the government insisted it did not listen in on calls. Instead, it merely collected telephone metadata, such as number dialed, time of the calls and duration.
But just how much of a caller's personal information can metadata reveal? As a new Stanford study demonstrates -- a lot.
Stanford University Ph.D. student Jonathan Mayer and his research partner created an Android app called MetaPhone that asked users to volunteer their phone records in an effort to learn what could be uncovered from metadata. More than 500 people signed up.
"We began by ID'ing the organizations associated with the phone numbers in our dataset. We did that primarily by using phone books provided by Yelp and Google. Totally public. Totally easy to access," Mayer told CNET's Sumi Das. READ MORE ->
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- May 31, 2014 1:35 am
My next phone is going back in time to a simple call text version. That is all I use most of the time anyway.
