What NSA is actually doing with your records. A mythbuster: Must read

Big data, metadata, and traffic analysis:

What are these big companies (facebook, google) actually selling the NSA. What NSA actually does with your private data

It's one of the most remarkable hubbub around and a matter of absolute curiousity over the people both online and offline to noise about the NSA spying in your private life.

NSA afterall, was founded in 1952 for this code breaking and intercepting communications as its mission.

It's possible, of course, that the NSA is doing something technically interesting, like intercepting and breaking SSL-protected Internet communications. But the NSA doesn't have to bother with deciphering your PGP-protected love notes to your sweetie to know what you're up to. No, they can combine their age old techniques of working with metadata and traffic analysis with 21st century big data analysis to have a darn good idea of what you, along with everyone else, are doing.

It's not just the NSA, though. Big Internet businesses like google and others have been using the same techniques to deliver customized Web experiences to you for almost twenty years. 

Metadata

It's metadata that gives anyone with access to your data, not just the NSA, the ability to work out what you're up to even if your data is locked up and encrypted.Unless you're a serious photography, video, or music collector, you may not know about metadata. It's "data about data" -- or, more properly in this context, it's data about content. When you look at a Web page, a photo, or an e-mail message, what you see is the human-readable content. Hiding underneath that picture of a kitten, the ITworld Web page, or a note from your mom, is all kinds of data about what you see.

With a digital photograph, there can be dozens of data fields. There are multiple formats for this data. The most popular are Exchangeable Image File Format (EIFF), International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), and Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (EMP).

A photograph's metadata can record the camera that was used to take it, and the date and time it was taken -- along with the location, if the camera has a GPS. If you edit your photograph, the metadata can also be used to record what software and operating system you used. And with the right software, or even a Website like exifdata, you can read any image's metadata.

Web pages are the same way. You probably know about cookies and your Web browser history, but there's far more data available out there about your Web interactions than you might think.

MIT media lab immersion program

If you think that's bad, consider all the information that the MIT Media Lab Immersion programcan pull up about you from just the From:, To:, CC: and Timestamp fields of the messages in your Gmail account. Stunning isn't it? When you take a closer look at in the traffic analysis, you'll see it's actually far more revealing than it looks at a casual glance.

I don't need to be a traffic analysis expert to figure out who you interact with -- I just need four fields from my Gmail messages

Not worried? Think you can dodge around e-mail tracking with a few simple tricks? That's what former CIA director David Petraeus thought -- and he was wrong, wrong, wrong. Petraeus and his mistress Paula Broadwell used Gmail to communicate, but never actually sent messages to each other. Instead, they used anonymous email accounts to leave drafts of messages for the other to read. Safe? Anything but.

While they did avoid the common mistake of using their home Internet accounts, Broadwell, at least, logged into the various mail accounts from public hotel Wi-Fi networks. From there, it was simply a matter of collating guest lists from various hotels, IP login records, and, eventually, it appears, access to the actual drafts.

So it was that the head of the CIA itself was brought down by an FBI investigation of anonymous e-mails. Do you think you can do better? I doubt it.

- Source itworld.com. Compiled by Harshvardhan Pandey.