When the first NSA surveillance story broke in June, about the agency’s collection of phone metadata from Verizon, most people likely had never heard the word metadata before. Even some security and privacy experts weren’t sure what the term encompassed, and now a group of security researchers at Stanford have started a new project to collect anonymous data from Android users to see exactly how much information can be drawn from the logs of phone calls and texts.
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“Phone metadata is inherently revealing. We want to rigorously prove it—for the public, for Congress, and for the courts,” Jonathan Mayer, a PhD student at Stanford and a junior affiliate scholar at the Security Lab, wrote in an explanation of the project.
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