What can you learn about me from 24 hours of my metadata?

"Metadata" is much much more than "billing information"

What can you learn about me from 24 hours of my metadata?

Australia’s surveillance agency offered to share bulk metadata with other countries – here’s some of mine to start the ball rolling Oliver Laughland

On Monday, Guardian Australia revealed that Australia’s surveillance agency, the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), offered to share “bulk” amounts of its own citizens’ metadata with intelligence partners overseas.

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, described metadata, the information generated as you use technology, as just “billing data” but many technology experts argue that this data is more revealing than content data itself.

There are many kinds of metadata, and it is unclear exactly what the DSD may have targeted.

For 24 hours, I kept a log of all my technology use in a metadata diary. Below are some of the highlights. All the information included below was logged in metadata:

At 11.26am on Monday I logged on to Twitter and sent this tweet: “Revealed: Australian spy agency offered to share data about ordinary citizens http://gu.com/p/3kp3z/tw latest @guardianaus exclusive.” The tweet was sent from 35 Reservoir Street, Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia.I am Oliver Laughland, journalist, Guardian Australia, my email isoliver.laughland@guardiannews.com, my profile is here and I am based in Sydney, Australia.

At 11.46am I replied to an email titled “Life” from “Mum”. The email was sent from Twickenham in London, four days previously. I had marked it as a priority. I have received 89 emails in the past 24 hours, including eight from katharine.viner@theguardian.com sent from Canberra and four from the office of the prime minister of Australia. I have sent 17 emails.

Subject lines of emails received during the 24-hour period have included “SOS SOS SOS SOS” from bridie.jabour@theguardian.com, “Credit Card Debit Rejected” from customer_service@tpg.com.au, and “My favourite pool” from vicky.frost@theguardian.com.

I entered more than 50 Google search terms in 24 hours. These included: “Scott Morrison Christianity”, “Scott Morrison TPV”, “Scott Morrison Manus capacity”, “Buzzfeed Syrian Army Cats”, “define insouciant” and “section 15 intelligence services act”. I Googled “Oliver Laughland” twice.

The last action I took on my phone on 2 December, from Darlinghurst, Sydney, was to Google “Hotels Phuket January” at 10.40pm. The first action I took on my phone on 3 December, from the same location in Darlinghurst, was to check my emails at 7.31am (I received 15 from the last time I checked at 10.37pm).

I logged on to Facebook for the first time at 5.29pm on 2 December from 35 Reservoir Street, Surry Hills. I logged on four further times. I am now attending Paul’s b’day drinks on Thursday 5 December at Paramount House, Commonwealth Street, Sydney, starting from 6.30pm. I declined Tom’s birthday on 15 December in London, UK. I “liked” Tottenham Hotspur and This American Life.

I received a text message from an Australian number in Darlinghurst at 1.23pm. I have exchanged 15 texts with the same person in the past 24 hours and four phone calls. The longest of these was one minute, at 7.02pm on Monday, the shortest was 13 seconds at 9am on Tuesday (we were a couple of hundred metres apart in Darlinghurst during this phone call).

I have made two transactions on my Visa debit card. At 2.46pm I spent $42.50 at Reservoir on Reservoir Street, Surry Hills, Sydney. At 9.45pm I spent $60 at Fratelli Fresh on Macleay Street in Potts Point, Sydney.

At 8.33pm, I took two photographs on Macleay Street, Potts Point, with an iPhone 5. At 8.34pm I sent an email to “Mum” with the subject heading “Alpine Christmas tree in hot Australia”. It contained a 543kb attachment and was sent from Macleay Street, Potts Point.

At 9.13am on Tuesday I made a phone call to a UK number in Twickenham. It lasted seven minutes. In that time I walked from the corner of Oxford Street and Wentworth Avenue in Sydney to 35 Reservoir Street, Surry Hills. I have created a document on Google Drive from the same location. That document is titled OLmetadatapersonal. I shared it at 11.25am on Tuesday.

What have you learned about me from this 24 hours in metadata? Tell me in the thread below.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/03/what-can-you-learn-about-me-from-24-hours-of-my-metadata?CMP=twt_fd