When NSA's phone tracking was revealed, the agency quickly pointed out that they weren't listening to phone conversations. But they're tracking who you call, when, and for how long - your metadata. Still, claims that metadata is anonymous isn't exactly comforting, especially since Stanford researchers say connecting a person's name to phone metadata isn't just easy, it's "trivial."

Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler collected 5,000 phone numbers from volunteers using an Android app they designed for the research project. In a preliminary, low-effort sweep of public information on Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook, the researchers were able to match 27% of numbers with an individual name. When they dug a little deeper — Googling 100 phone numbers individually — they matched 60 numbers in just one hour. Adding in the previous sources boosted that to 73.

Next, Mayer and Mutchler ran the 100 phone numbers through Intelius, "a cheap consumer-oriented service" offering reverse phone number lookup and public records searches, to simulate the data crunching capabilities of an organization as huge as the NSA. This led to a grand total of 91 out of 100 numbers matched with an individual or business.

If two academics running a quick and easy experiment on a tiny budget can identify phone numbers with 91% accuracy, it isn't difficult to believe that an organization with the NSA's largesse achieve 100% accuracy.


[Web Policy Blog via The Atlantic]