Scary? Impressive? Both?


Recently, I heard this podcast on the metadata we put it there, knowingly or unknowingly, and what can be known about us using that (“Metadata” refers to data about data. For example, that pic you took has data other than the image itself. What else does it have? This blog gives you an idea).

The host showed a pic put out by a random (non-famous) person to Andreas Weigend, the ex-Amazon Chief Scientist, and asked him, “What can you tell us about this person based on just this one pic?”

The first test was with a selfie a woman had taken next to the famous mermaid statue in Copenhagen. Ok, knowing it was taken in Copenhagen was easy. Weigend pointed out that the metadata of the pic told him:
-          The date and time on which the photo was taken (which means her whereabout at that point in time is now known);
-          Which phone and model she used to take the pic;
-          Next, he cross-referenced this pic with Google’s image match feature to find other pics of the woman. One of those pics was her Facebook (or Instagram?) profile pic and bingo! He knew her name and any other data that was public in her FB profile (e.g. city of residence etc)!

Weigend pointed out that the GPS on your phone tracks your location all the time, and can even track if a person is walking faster than normal! Or as my wife found, the phone can remind her that she’s in office most days at “this” time, so how come today she wasn’t?!

All of the above wasn’t even getting into clubbing data from multiple sources, says Weigend. Like the time he took a blurry-beyond-recognition pic of his friend and yet Facebook knew who it was! How? Facebook compared his GPS location at the time the pic was taken with the location of his friends on FB at that same time and voila!

As the byline for that podcast says:
“Reading photos is more than a digital parlor trick. It’s the future of commerce, marketing, policing, lending, and basically everything else.”

All this can sound very impressive or scary or both. Culture matters in how you respond, says Weigend e.g. in Germany, they trust the government more than companies whereas in America, it’s the opposite.

And then there’s India… where people worry about privacy because of Aadhar while remaining blissfully ignorant about what their usage of Facebook, WhatsApp, Amazon and Google has done to their privacy.

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