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The metadata trap

How metadata is revealing the details of our lives

    The internet now facilitates almost every aspect of our lives: from communications to health, travel, finances, and work. And with this tool comes consequences we rarely see: data about your activities, behavior patterns, personal circumstances, political leanings, and even thoughts are being generated and used by third parties online. For those capable of collecting and analyzing large amounts of our metadata, this can pose serious threats to our privacy, security, and sense of wellbeing.

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    Covid passports

    Even coarse, anonymized location metadata can be used to track individuals or reveal group behaviors. During the pandemic, contact tracing apps like Singapore’s TraceTogether used the BlueTrace protocol to log Bluetooth encounters between users. Though IDs were anonymized and rotated, logs were uploaded to a centralized database. This enabled health authorities—and, controversially, law enforcement—to reverse IDs and access personal data, raising serious concerns about the potential for abuse and the erosion of privacy in public health surveillance.

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      AI & health data centralization

      Sam Altman’s health-focused ventures, including Thrive AI Health and the massive Stargate AI project, aim to centralize personal health data to power AI-driven analytics and personalized care. While promising advances in disease detection and wellness, these initiatives raise significant privacy concerns. Aggregating sensitive data like sleep, stress, and movement patterns – even with opt-in controls – creates risks of misuse, surveillance, or breaches. Critics warn that such centralization could erode personal privacy under the guise of health innovation and optimization.

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        The case of Starva & geolocation tracking

        Strava’s metadata collection shows how everyday digital traces can compromise privacy and security. Aggregated GPS data has revealed military base layouts and soldier routines, even bypassing Strava’s privacy features. Researchers have reverse-engineered obscured data to uncover private routes and identities. This highlights the power of metadata surveillance—not just for marketing, but as a tool capable of exposing sensitive personal and national information, raising critical concerns about digital privacy.

          Compiling you: From marketing to political manipulation

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          Data brokers

          Metadata is a powerful resource, but only once it is aggregated in large amounts. Data brokers worldwide specialize in collecting vast amounts of people’s metadata to form marketing portfolios of individual people, including their browsing and shopping habits, preferences and tastes, and even political beliefs. This information, often processed by AI systems, is then sold to third parties like marketing and advertising firms for targeted messaging. But this information has also been used for more nefarious and manipulating goals.

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            The case of Cambridge Analytica

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              DOGE and the centralization of government data

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