Metadata Quotes

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

The author of our constitution, James Madison, … would be aghast

General Hayden knows full well the powerful and invasive nature of metadata.

You essentially have a human-relations database on millions of Americans. The administration said, "Well we're not listening to calls, we don't collect content." As [Vice President] Joe Biden said when he was a United States senator, you don't need to listen to those calls. If you have who somebody called, when and where, and you learned, for example, somebody called a psychiatrist three times in the last few days and twice after midnight, you know a lot about that person that they may not want people to know about them, especially the government.

The semiology and phenomenology of hashtaggery intrigues me. From what I understand, it all began very simply: on Twitter, hashtags - those little checkerboard marks that look like this # - were used to mark phrases or names, in order to make it easier to search for them among the zillions and zillions of tweets.

Plaintiffs have a very significant expectation of privacy in an aggregated collection of their telephony metadata covering the last five years …. the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature…. The program infringes of that degree of privacy that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.

For a long time, nobody had figured out Information Architecture, so we all just made stuff up.

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. Intelligence agencies are looking at phone numbers and durations of calls; they are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.

If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, why make the haystack bigger.

Cell-site data - like mailing addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses - are information that facilitate personal communications rather than part of the content of those communications themselves. The government's collection of business records containing these data, therefore, is not a search.

To a collector of curios, the dust is metadata.

Any time someone tries to tell you that metadata is 'meaningless, don't worry, it's just who you call, it's just phone records, it's not a big deal' - realize we kill people based on metadata. So they must be pretty darn certain that they think they know something based on metadata.

Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.

How do you photograph data?

ArcGIS Online is the complete hosted GIS in the cloud, supporting mapping and apps. Additions to this component have included smart mapping, formal metadata, better administration, and high-performance geocoding.

If explicit metadata is a real problem, it raises problems that just can't be solved. It's not that we're not good at it; it's the problems cannot be solved because we're not going to agree about these deep questions of how we organize.

Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge.

In the very near future, I guarantee that the pictures you post on social media will affect your credit rating, health and auto insurance policies, and much more. It will all happen automatically. In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures. What's at stake, obviously, is the future of the human race!