One of the most disingenuous arguments in the aftermath of the NSA spying revelations is that the American people shouldn't be concerned about the government hoovering up its sensitive information ...

In January 2014, documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that a Canadian spy agency used a unique identifier to follow thousands of Canadians as they moved about the country. The tracking all ...

Sometimes you have to give up a little privacy in order to find out how much — or how little — privacy you really have. So I handed over the keys to my Gmail account to Cesar Hidalgo, a professor at ...

Update: Following up on some useful feedback from Hacker News users, I tweaked the spying experiment today to be a bit more effective. The first criticism was that stating the model’s %-accuracy is ...

It's my favorite in large part because it's my metadata. It comes from my Gmail account. The relationships it maps are, more or less, my life — orange circles for Planet Money, purple for Brooklyn, ...

We are all going to have to get used to the word metadata. Explaining what it means in simple terms is quite tricky, for it is a genuinely abstract concept. (And let me warn the purists up front that ...

Public cloud providers are replacing internal corporate data centers at a rapid pace. Technology and functions get handed over to a cloud provider. One thing appears to be missing, however: ...

Before the advent of digital photography, adding information about photographs was easy: You simply wrote in the margins or on the back of a snapshot. Turn it over and there was the information: ...

Update: My migration from picasa originally stalled on trying to export Picasa "star rating". As I reasearched I learned this is really an issue about metadata, adherence to metadata standards, and ...