One of President Obama’s pushbacks on the phone monitoring flap is that folks shouldn’t worry because the government is just collecting “metadata”.
My first reaction was; “How many folks know what metadata is?”
My 2nd reaction was: “Does he have any idea what metadata is?”
For the record, Wiki says that the term metadata refers to “data about data”.
The term is ambiguous, as it is used for two fundamentally different concepts (types).
Structural metadata is about the design and specification of data structures and is more properly called “data about the containers of data”.
Descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content.
In this case, a useful description would be “data about data content” … “metacontent”.
That definition got me thinking: “Man, there’s a lot of info in phone metadata – calling number, called number, time, call duration, location”
Note: The President left out “location” in his remarks … hmmm.
Why might this “metadata” be troubling to folks?
Let’s work through a hypothetical …
The Homa Files 