Gadgetory

when it comes to phone metadata the government and computer scientists have largely been on opposite sides of the privacy debate no doubt defense of the NSA's program was it's just metadata and so it seemed to us it would be worth the time to try to see whether that claim was true empirically metadata includes details like the number dial the time of the call and duration just how sensitive is that information according to research done by Stanford PhD student Jonathan Mayer and his partner very they created an Android app meta phone that asked users to volunteer their phone records in an effort to learn what can be uncovered from metadata more than 500 people signed up we began by identifying the organizations associated with the phone numbers in our data set and we did that primarily using phone books provided by Yelp and by Google totally public totally easy to access with the help of Facebook's phone directory feature people search services and Google more than 90% of the numbers were quickly identified we noted when a business was a firearms dealer we noted when a business was a health service provider users also place calls to religious organizations financial services and marijuana dispensaries although NSA surveillance is limited to two or three degrees of separation from an original suspect the meta phone app illustrates how the program can reach many people there are these numbers that are very very popular like t-mobile's voicemail number or FedEx or Delta Airlines or one of my favorites telemarketers these the spam phone calls which call loads and loads of people and the NSA's rules don't prohibit the agency from following those hops Mayer and his partner plan to examine the data further to see if other information can be found though focus on text messages next and they're working on something called a dating detector but this is like what computer science people do on a weekend I guess we don't go on dates we just build systems for detecting people going on dates and so we built a machine learning system for identifying participants who were weren't in a romantic relationship it raises very real privacy concerns about what happens when our phone records and public information reveal very personal affairs in Stanford California I'm Sumida cnet.com for CBS News