Calling It 'Metadata' Doesn't Make Surveillance Less Intrusive
"This is just metadata. There is no content involved." That was how Sen. Dianne Feinstein defended the NSA's blanket surveillance of Americans' phone records and Internet activity. Before those revelations, not many people had heard of metadata, the term librarians and programmers use for the data that describes a particular document or record it's linked to. It's the data you find on a card in a library catalog, or the creation date and size of a file in a folder window. It's the penciled note on the back of a snapshot: "Kathleen and Ashley, Lake Charles, 1963." Or it could be the times, numbers and GPS locations attached to the calls in a phone log.
"Metadata" was bound to break out sooner or later, riding the wave of "data" in all its forms and combinations. "Big data" and "data mining" are the reigning tech buzzwords these days, and university faculties are scrambling to meet the surge in demand for courses in the hot new field of data science. It's as if "data" is usurping "information" as a byword. Up to now, "data" has played a supporting role in the information age. There's a popular definition of data as the raw material that becomes information when it's processed and made meaningful. That puts information at the center of the modern tech world, but it isn't how anybody actually uses the two words. I have this image of somebody working a spreadsheet as a manager leans over and says, "Is it information yet?"
But the shift in focus from information to data reflects a genuine difference between the two. "Information" brings to mind the knowledge that's gathered in libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers and journals — stuff that has an independent existence in the world. "Data" is always connected to particular things and events. It comes from experiments, sensors, official records. Or it's the scuff marks we leave behind as we click on websites, make calls, go through the E-ZPass tollbooths, visit an ATM. It's all out there, accumulating in ginormabytes, overflowing the server farms.
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