Spy Games

by Rick Dawes

Who’s after your metadata?

A local tech professional says metadata, the digital information behind online communications, is valuable to businesses and can be categorized to make understanding large amounts of information easier.

There are also a number of things metadata can reveal about you.

Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a document revealing a top secret Communications Security Establishment of Canada exercise that was conducted on Canadian soil. Using the public Wi-Fi of an international airport, metadata of internet users in the airport was collected for two weeks. CSEC chief John Foster appeared before the Senate national defense committee to defend the operation and said CSEC was acting with the law. He said the information was not being used to make profiles of Canadians, which is illegal for CSEC to do, but rather the data was to study network access around public Wi-Fi.

The redacted PDF document can be found on the CBC website.

Cell phone metadata may tell the location where a call was made, the phone number of the device used, the duration of communication and number of calls made from a device. The content of the private message is not part of the metadata.

Metadata takes the form of meta tags on webpages, also known as “key words.”

Windsor IT company Alphakor handles search engine optimization for businesses. Brany Vaillancourt is director of marketing at the firm and uses tags like these to bring customer’s webpages to the top of search cues.

“Metadata to us means developing a website that speaks to what consumers are looking for today on the web through Google, Yahoo, Bing,” Vaillancourt said.

She described meta tags as a “behind-the scenes” infrastructure to a webpage.

“It’s kind of like a means to catalogue,” she said. “So it’s like taking a website that has a thousand words a page and fifty pages, down to the top fifty topics. So instead of analyzing word by word it’s analyzing by topic.”

This makes it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on Google.

Google offers meta tag suggestions for web sites and reports on what keywords are being used in certain industries around the world. Vaillancourt said this can then be filtered down to find out top key words by county, city or town.

“They actually go and capture those searches that people are making every month and will show you the most popular search term,” Vaillancourt said. “So if you change one word by one way you can drastically change the traffic to your web site.”

Vaillancourt said in her industry, metadata is valuable because of what you can do with it not necessarily the content linked to it. It is easy to figure out what tags are attached to a web page so other businesses may base their strategies off of high ranking web sites.

“The person who gets to the right keywords first will typically do better because they’ve been established in that topic for longer. So if it takes you six months for you to get to where your competitors have already been, it’s difficult to jump them at that point,” said Vaillancourt.

Moe Hachem is a downtown resident who lives on University Avenue near Pelissier Avenue. He regularly uses the Internet and occasional he logs onto the free public Wi-Fi in Starbucks down the street from his apartment. He had no prior knowledge of metadata.

“I never really heard about it,” said Hachem. “Never heard that term before.”

When Hachem messages with friends on Facebook or when he uses a search engine he is using metadata that can reveal a variety of parameters.

According to the leaked documents CSEC was using the data collected from Canadians to run simulations involving hypothetical kidnappers using mobile devices.

The Wi-Fi and cellular data were being analyzed by a program called Tradecraft. Using other monitored Wi-Fi spots, metadata could be filtered by search parameters to triangulate the origin of the data and the device that sent it.

Hachem doesn’t think being tracked all the time by the use of data would be good but in some occasions it could be beneficial.

“Maybe to feel safe if you have that option, to turn that on when you want that option on, then ok,” Hachem said. “But there should be an off switch.”

Downtown St. Clair Hospitality student Krystina Bigelow said she uses her mobile device all day and connects to public Wi-Fi too. She said the possibility of someone using her metadata makes her uneasy.

“I think everyone just wants privacy, like to an extent right?” Bigelow said. “I think it would just be creepy. It’s like the government is stalking you.”

While privacy issues are being raised concerning CSEC’s mass collection of people’s metadata the redacted PDF said, “all the previous analytics, while successful experimentally, ran much to slowly to allow for practical productization.”

With the U.N. announcing privacy a human right, do you know who sees your metadata and what it could reveal about you?