Saturday, September 20, 2014

How your innocent smartphone passes on almost your entire life to the secret service

30 juli 2014 16:46
Door Hans de Zwart

This article was originally written in Dutch by Dimitri Tokmetzis and was published by De Correspondent. Illustrations by Momkai.

 Intelligence services collect metadata on the communication of all citizens. Politicians would have us believe that this data doesn’t say all that much. A reader of De Correspondent put this to the test and demonstrated otherwise: metadata reveals a lot more about your life than you think.


Ton Siedsma is nervous. He made the decision weeks ago, but keeps postponing it. It’s the 11th of November, a cold autumn evening. At ten past eight (20:10:48 to be exact), while passing Elst station on the way home, he activates the app. It will track all of his phone’s metadata over the coming week.

Metadata is not the actual content of the communication, but the data about the communication; like the numbers he calls or whatsapps, and where his phone is at a particular moment. Whom he e-mails, the subject of the e-mails and the websites he visits.

Ton won’t be doing anything out of the ordinary. He’ll just lead his normal life. On weekdays, this means biking from his house in Nijmegen to the station and taking the train to Amsterdam. On Saturday, he’ll drive his car to Den Bosch and spend the night near Zuiderpark, returning to Nijmegen the next day by public transportation. Later on in the day he’ll have some drinks at a cafĂ© called St. Anna.

After exactly a week, on Monday, 18 November, he concludes the experiment, saying afterwards that he felt liberated when doing so. There’s an easy explanation for his nervousness: what he’ll be doing, where he’ll be and who he has contact with will be seen by tens of thousands of people. Today, by you and me, and all the other readers of this article.

Over the past months,>>>

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