What your metadata says about you

7/28/2019 What your metadata says about you

1/4

Q&A

What your metadata says about youFrom MITs Csar Hidalgo, a new window on what your e-mailhabits reveal

By Abraham Riesman | JUNE 30, 2013

BARRY CHIN/GLOBE STAFF

Csar Hidalgo (left) with Daniel Smilkov and Deepak Jagdish at the MIT Media Lab.

AS RECENTLY AS a few weeks ago, metadata was an obscure term known mainly to techies

and academics. Broadly defined, metadata is data about other data. For the phone company,

it might be the time and length of your calls, but not the conversation itself; in the context of

e-mail, it means information such as the sender and recipients of a messagebasically,

everything except what the message actually says.

Ideas

Get the new BostonGlobe iPhone app today - enjoy a 1 month FREE trial and stay informed on the go!What your metadata says about you - Ideas - The Boston Globe http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/29/what-your-m

of 4 6/30/13 4:18


2/4

Then came the revelation that the National Security Agency has been collecting metadata

about millions of Americans phone calls. Suddenly metadata exploded as a public issue. Is it

a harmless way for the government to track dangerous patterns or a tightening net around

our lives?

For Csar Hidalgo, this national conversation about metadata couldnt come too soon. A

professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, Hidalgo has been obsessed with

communications metadata for years. To him, metadata isnt merely a technical issue, or a

political one, but an emotional onea cloud of knowledge about your behavior that, once you

confront it, can literally change your life.

To make metadata more visceral, he and a group of graduate students are launching a new

online project to help people visualize their own metadata, or at least one small corner of it.

The program, called Immersion, asks users for their Gmail address and password; it then

scans every e-mail in their accounts and scrapes the metadata to create a portrait of their

personal network. With the circles and lines of a network diagram, it highlights the 100people with whom youve communicated most, and shows how closely theyre connected to

you and how thickly interconnected with one another in your mailbox. Unlike Google, or the

NSA, the project also offers an instant deletion option: Remove your name, and it erases your

metadata.

CONTINUE READING BELOW

The project has already been running in beta form

in the Media Lab lobby, and about 500 people

have run their networks. Some people have one

key person in their inbox, creating a huge circle

like the star in a solar system; some people have

what Hidalgo calls the George Costanza two distinct clusters of contacts that rarely

interact (Worlds are colliding! George is getting upset!); and so on. The images are abstract,

but once you get a handle on what they mean, its eye-opening to see the topography of your

personal web.

The project goes public June 30. Users can sign up at immersion.media.mit.edu. Hidalgo

spoke with Ideas from the Media Lab.

IDEAS: Should we really see emotional meaning in metadata?

HIDALGO: All of this data is about people. Data basically doesnt make sense without

humans. Its a very human construct, and, in the past, most of our data was not about people.

Get full access to BostonGlobe.com

Related

Participate in the Media Lab's

'Immersion' project

What your metadata says about you - Ideas - The Boston Globe http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/29/what-your-m

of 4 6/30/13 4:18


3/4

and their properties.

But more and more, recently, all of this metadata is collected, originally for operational

purposes. Whether its e-mail data or financial-transaction data, it all involves people. But,

more than that, it involves interactions between people. And thats why I think metadata has

this emotional component: because ultimately, those interactions are the ones that we

associate emotions with.

IDEAS: When you first saw your own e-mail metadata mapped out, what did you feel?

HIDALGO: When you see it all together, it is, in a way, an out-of-body experience. Youre

seeing all of your network and youre seeing yourself out of it and youre seeing it from afar

and youre seeing it in one picture.

You start realizing that, eventually, you are not interacting with peopleyoure interacting

with webs of people. Because all the people youve interacted with, theyre actually connected

in tens or maybe hundreds of indirect paths between them. They exist in your absence. So

that out-of-body experience, Ive found that it was very powerful.

IDEAS: How do you feel about the way metadata is being discussed since the NSA

revelations?

HIDALGO: Its like the world is catching up to what a fringe group of academics was aware

of in 2004 and 2005. Nobody liked [thinking about metadata], and nobody cared about us,

and they all thought that working with mobile phone records or e-mails was sort of a curiosityor a stupidity. And weve come to a world where, now, its completely the opposite.

Everybodys chasing that. So, for me, I think its healthy that these kinds of [news stories]

come out, because it helps everybody start having conversations that are rich, that are

important.

IDEAS: Are there ethical or political lessons about metadata that Immersion teaches?

HIDALGO: What I believe is, if youre going to make platforms that deal with personal data,

you have to develop ways of doing this in such a way that you can be transparent with the

user about the data you have, about how youre handling it, and about how the user can

withdraw the data from your system. And I think we dont have that [in society], because

what happens is, all of these things are buried in these user agreements that are longer than

the Constitution....Hopefully, [with our deletion policy], we can lead by example, by showing

that, when its possible to build these platforms, it may be something that people appreciate.

Its a very simple feature on the platform, but it makes a very strong moral point about the



of 4 6/30/13 4:18


4/4

2013 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY

IDEAS: How can seeing your own communications metadata change your life?

HIDALGO: If you see a movie where generals are planning a war, they have a little map and

little toy soldiers, and thats how they move around. They dont have a view of how soldiers

see things on the ground. They have this view that is more of a birds-eye view, a view from

afar. The platforms that we have now, like Facebook and Twitter, provide us a streambut

that stream is not a map. Its like looking out the car window, but its not like looking at the

GPS.

From that perspective, I think [metadata visualization] allows us to think a little bit more

about who you connect to and why. Are we having healthy relationships? Are there parts of

our networks that maybe wed like to grow more? Are there parts of the network that wed like

to connect with other parts of the network that we have not yet done so?

I do not believe that just connecting more is better. Thats overly simplistic, and I dont think

anybody truly believes that. Eventually, its not about having more connections but about

having the right connections.

IDEAS: Would the world be a better place if everyone had access to all of their own

communications metadata?

HIDALGO: I do think that it might be a world that we want to give a shot. Id want to

explore the opportunity.

To participate in the Media Labs Immersion project, visit immersion.media.mit.edu.

Abraham Riesman is a writer and documentary filmmaker in New York City. You can see

his work at abrahamriesman.com.



of 4 6/30/13 4:18

What your metadata says about you

Documents

Transcript of What your metadata says about you