WebProNews

Tag: Metadata

  • Why Won’t Apple Allow This Simple App That Notifies Users of US Drone Strikes?

    An app that sends users an alert every time a US drone strike is reported in the news is too crude for Apple.

    The company has pulled the plug on Metadata+, an app from journalist Josh Begley that simply notifies people of publicly-available drone strike data.

    Begley also runs the @Dronestream Twitter account, which pretty much does the same thing as his app. It was there he reported Apple’s decision to pull the app:

    Apple’s incomprehensible disdain for this app actually goes back to 2012. Begley had problems getting Apple to approve his app, called Drones+ at the time.

    “If the content is found to be objectionable, and it’s literally just an aggregation of news, I don’t know how to change that,” Begley said at the time.

    Maybe a name change? That’s exactly what he did and last year, the Metadata+ app launched. It lasted for a while, before Apple yanked it on Sunday.

    It’s still available in the Google Play store.

    Apple’s always been rather puritanical with its app approval process – but that mostly has to do with the company’s inability to understand that adults might want to use apps with adult content.

    But as Gawker points out, Apple has plenty of “crude” apps sitting in its App Store.

    And a simple app that reports the news isn’t really one of them.

  • Skynet Is Real, and the NSA Uses It To Track Locations with Phone Metadata

    When a spy agency decides to call one of its various tracking programs Skynet, it’s just screwing with us, right?

    A troubling report about a journalist misidentified as a terrorist from The Intercept has revealed that the National Security Agency actually has a program called Skynet.

    If you’ve never seen the Terminator movies, here’s a crash course. If you have, you understand why this is so morbidly hilarious.

    The NSA’s Skynet is unlikely to become self-aware and wipe out humanity, but it is tracking people’s whereabouts using phone metadata. The reveal was provided by documents from none other than Edward Snowden.

    The Intercept calls Skynet “a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns … the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership.”

    But Skynet doesn’t always get it right, as would be expected. You know who also “moves like couriers”? Journalists reporting on said activity.

    From The Intercept:

    The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

    A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears his photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a “member of Al-Qa’ida” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. It also notes that he “works for Al Jazeera.”

    Zaidan has denied being part of Al-Qaeda. He has, however, spent a lot of time in Pakistan and Afghanistan – conducting interviews and such.

    Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ruled that the NSA’s bulk metadata collection is illegal.

  • NSA’s Bulk Phone Data Collection Illegal, Court Rules

    A federal appeals court has ruled that the bulk collections of your phone records is illegal.

    In a nearly 100-page ruling, the court vacated a lower court’s decision and stated that the bulk collection of metadata is not authorized by section 215 of The Patriot Act – the section upon which the surveillance programs have been operating for years.

    “The district court held that § 215 of the PATRIOT Act impliedly precludes judicial review; that plaintiffs‐appellants’ statutory claims regarding the scope of § 215 would in any event fail on the merits; and that § 215 does not violate the Fourth or First Amendments to the United States Constitution.  We disagree in part, and hold that § 215 and the statutory scheme to which it relates do not preclude judicial review, and that the bulk telephone metadata program is not authorized by § 215,” said the federal appeals court.

    The case was originally filed in 2013 by the ACLU, and subsequently thrown out. This ruling amends that error.

    “This appeal concerns the legality of the bulk telephone metadata collection program (the “telephone metadata program”), under which the National Security Agency (“NSA”) collects in bulk “on an ongoing daily basis” the metadata associated with telephone calls made by and to Americans, and aggregates those metadata into a repository or data bank that can later be queried.  Appellants challenge the program on statutory and constitutional grounds. Because we find that the program exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized, we vacate the decision below dismissing the complaint without reaching appellants’ constitutional arguments,” said Circuit judge Gerard E. Lynch.

    Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has shepherded NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations to the public, was pleased with the ruling and suggested that it should make many rethink their views on Snowden.

    Rand Paul is already using the ruling in a campaign tweet:

    As Wired points out, this decision could pave the way for a full legal challenge of the NSA and its surveillance initiatives.

    You can read the entire ruling below:

    Clapper Ca2 Opinion

    Image via Trevor Paglen, Wikimedia Commons

  • Google’s Cutts Talks EXIF Data As A Ranking Factor

    Google may use EXIF data attached to images as a ranking factor in search results. This isn’t exactly a new revelation, but it is the topic of a new “Webmaster Help” video from the company.

    Matt Cutts responds to the submitted question, “Does Google use EXIF data from pictures as a ranking factor?”

    “The short answer is: We did a blog post, in I think April of 2012 where we talked about it, and we did say that we reserve the right to use EXIF or other sort of metadata that we find about an image in order to help people find information,” Cutts says. “And at lest in the version of image search as it existed back then, when you clicked on an image, we would sometimes show the information from EXIF data in the righthand sidebar, so it is something that Google is able to parse out, and I think we do reserve the right to use it in ranking.”

    “So if your’e taking pictures, I would go ahead, and embed that sort of information if it’s available within your camera because, you know, if someone eventually wants to search for camera types or focal lengths or dates or something like that it can be possibly a useful source of information,” he continues. “So I’d go ahead and include it if it’s already there. I wouldn’t worry about adding it if it’s not there. But we do reserve the right to use it as potentially a ranking factor.”

    The blog post he was talking about was called, “1000 Words About Images,” and gives some tips on helping Google index your images, and a Q&A section. In that part, one of the questions is: What happens to the EXIF, XMP and other metadata my images contain?

    The answer was: “We may use any information we find to help our users find what they’re looking for more easily. Additionally, information like EXIF data may be displayed in the right-hand sidebar of the interstitial page that appears when you click on an image.”

    Google has made significant changes to image search since that post was written, causing a lot of sites to get a great deal less traffic from it.

    Image via YouTube

  • Rand Paul Sues Obama and NSA Over “Metadata”

    Rand Paul has taken a bold step against the NSA’s collection of “metadata” from U.S. citizens. He announced today that he has filed a historic lawsuit against the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Keith Alexander, FBI Director James Comey, and Barack Obama himself, according to Fox News.

    Paul is asking for the collection of “metadata”, supposedly only what numbers were dialed from where, to be proven unconstitutional and ceased. He says such data collection violates the Fourth Amendment.

    He said in an opinion piece for CNN, “Americans do not like to think of their government as some Orwellian leviathan, engaging in surveillance tactics that we only expect to see in oppressive autocracies. That such surveillance could be going on in what is ostensibly the freest nation in the world is a chilling thought indeed.”

    “There’s a huge and growing swell of protest in this country of people who are outraged that their records would be taken without suspicion, without a judge’s warrant and without individualization,” Paul said, at the press conference in Washington during which he made the announcement.

    The NSA has insisted the whole time that the privacy of American citizens is thoroughly protected. They say that the contents of such calls are not recorded, and that what they are doing is safely within legal boundaries. “We remain confident that the program is legal, as at least 15 judges have previously found,” a Justice Department spokesperson said Wednesday.

    Paul disagrees. He states that this “metadata” that is assumed to be harmless actually “reveals a wealth of detail” about Americans’ personal and professional associations “that are ordinarily unknown to the government.”

    It’s not only Senator Paul that is taking this stand against data collection. In fact, he said hundreds of thousands of people have joined, and he thinks that the suit could “conceivably represent hundreds of millions of people who have phone lines in this country.”

    He later stated in his Opinion piece, “We are told that these intrusive and unconstitutional measures are necessary to protect us from the forces of international terrorism. We are told that a surrender of our privacy rights is a small price to pay for the knowledge that we can sleep safe and secure in our beds.”

    Paul continued, “We reject this premise. We are committed to a safe America, but we do not accept the notion that a surveillance state is necessary to safeguard the lives and liberty of American citizens.”

    Wow. This ought to be interesting.

    Image via wikimedia commons

  • Pinterest, Getty Ink Image Metadata Deal

    Pinterest, Getty Ink Image Metadata Deal

    Thanks to a new partnership with Getty Images, Pinterest is about to provide a whole bunch of metadata to millions of photos that are pinned on the site.

    Starting soon, the Getty Images collection on Pinterest will include information like the name of the image, the caption, the photographer’s name, and more. Learning more about an image could help Pinterest users actually use the pin in question – for instance learn more about where to find a certain recipe.

    Pinterest describes how this metadata could be useful:

    For example, you may stumble across a pin of a delicious dish that strikes you as something you might like to make someday. Unfortunately, if the original pinner uploaded the image and skimped on the description or if the link is broken, we probably couldn’t tell you that it’s scallops with brussels sprouts, chorizo and mustard fondue. Also, if you searched for “scallops with brussels sprouts,” we wouldn’t know that this great image by Getty Images contributor Thomas Barwick is a match. With Getty Images’ help, we hope to be able to make this image more useful and suggest another recipe with scallops and brussels sprouts or healthy scallop recipes.

    Not only does this move allow Pinterest to provide more relevant information to users (something that the company has been focusing on for the past few months), but it clears up any future copyright discrepancies with on of the biggest photo agencies in the world.

    The terms of the deal were undisclosed, but it will involve Pinterest paying Getty Images a specific fee for all the metadata, and with that fee Pinterest is protected against future claims of image misuse from Getty. Since its launch, Pinterest has been mired in copyright battles – even including rumored scrums with Getty. Last year, Pinterest rolled out Flickr integration to give attribution to photos in pins from the Yahoo-owned site.

    Image via Pinterest Blog

  • FISA Court Orders NSA To Release Phone Surveillance Documents

    Since early June, the U.S. government has been slowly opening up about the NSA’s numerous surveillance programs in response to a number of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Some civil liberty groups, however, think that the government isn’t being as transparent as they should be and have been pushing the government to release more data.

    The Hill reports that the FISA court has sided with the ACLU in a motion filed by the organization that sought to have the government release documents pertaining to Section 215 of the Patriot Act. If you recall, defenders of the NSA say that Section 215 is what allows them to collect Americans’ phone metadata. With this win, the public will finally get to see the legal interpretation of Section 215 that allowed the NSA to collect phone records.

    “We are pleased that the surveillance court has recognized the importance of transparency to the ongoing public debate about the NSA’s spying,” said Alex Abdo, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “For too long, the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of Americans has been shrouded in unjustified secrecy. Today’s ruling is an overdue rebuke of that practice. Secret law has no place in our democracy.”

    So, what’s next? Well, the government has until October 4 to submit all documents relevant to the surveillance court’s rulings on Section 215. At the time, the government must also propose which information in the documents should be redacted. After that, the documents will be thoroughly reviewed and then released to the public once all the proper redactions have been made.

    As you can imagine, this is a pretty big win for the ACLU. In the past, the organization and others like it have lost similar motions and lawsuits that sought to sought to obtain more information about surveillance programs or even shut them down. With increased pressure from both citizens and Congress, the Obama administration really has no choice but to release the documents. Not doing so would continue to erode faith in the administration, and that’s one thing Obama has continually stated he would like to avoid.

    It should be noted that today’s win does not cover the documents the ACLU is currently seeking to declassify in a lawsuit filed in New York. In that particular lawsuit, the ACLU claims the NSA’s phone metadata collection program violated Americans’ First and Fourth Amendments protections. In recent weeks, other organizations, like the NRA, have joined the lawsuit seeking the same disclosures.

    [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

  • Facebook Assuages Photo-Posting Privacy Concerns, Talks EXIF Data

    You may have seen a viral message sweeping around Facebook lately – one that claims that simply posting a photo on the network could open you up to info-snooping. Basically, the warning suggests that stored EXIF metadata in photos are giving creepers your exact location. Scary, right?

    Well, Facebook’s security team has taken to Facebook (duh) to set your mind at ease. They assert that this is categorically false.

    The Facebook Security team shared this note, which is part refresher course on EXIF data and part reassurance that Facebook doesn’t display location EXIF data on photos shared with others.

    The Facebook Security Team has received a number of questions about recent stories warning people against inadvertently sharing location information when posting photos online. Here’s the story: When you take a photo, your camera attaches information, called EXIF data, to the photo. With some cameras, this is limited to the name of the file, its format, and date of creation. Modern cameras will also include the type of camera and photo settings, and cameras with access to the internet or GPS (like the cameras in smartphones) will sometimes attach the location where the photo was taken.

    Generally speaking, if you email a copy of a photo or post it to the web, you are also sharing the associated EXIF data, since it automatically stays with the photo when you make a copy. To prevent that from accidentally happening when you post photos on Facebook, we don’t display location EXIF data in the version of your photo that you share with others. You can always choose to share things like location or the date of the photo by tagging a location or adding it to your timeline.

    Facebook also has this up in their Help center concerning metadata on downloaded photos:

    “When someone downloads your photo from Facebook, they won’t be able to see any of the photo’s metadata. Metadata is information automatically added to a photo when it’s taken. This information is uploaded to Facebook along with some photos.”

    Of course, anything you post publicly to Facebook (or any other social network for that matter) is just that – public. So if you post a photo of you and your kids at the park, people will be able to see that you an your kids are at the park. Don’t be dumb about your privacy. But when it comes to the behind the scenes stuff, the data that can be hidden to some, and exposed for nefarious purposes, Facebook is assuring users that other people won’t be able to discern a location from any metadata attached to photos – because Facebook doesn’t display it on public versions of photos.

    Facebook: “Carry on.”

  • House Proves Yet Again That It Cares Not For Your Privacy

    The House proved earlier this year that it doesn’t care about your privacy when it voted in favor of CISPA yet again. Now the House has cemented the fact that it cares not for your civil liberties.

    The Hill reports that the House voted 205-217 against an amendment from Rep. Justin Amash that would have stopped the NSA from collecting Americans’ phone records. The amendment was proposed as an addition to the annual Defense Department spending bill. If it had passed, it would have prevented the NSA from targeting anybody not currently under investigation.

    As expected, the Obama administration, pro-NSA members of Congress and the intelligence community would have none of it. They lobbied furiously at the beginning of the week to shoot down the amendment when it became clear that it was headed to the floor for a vote. In short, they argued that a vote for Amash’s amendment would be a vote for terrorism.

    Rep. Amash’s amendment wasn’t the only NSA-related amendment being voted on last night though. The House, in a 409-12 vote, approved an amendment from Rep. Mike Pompeo that would prevent the NSA from intentionally targeting Americans. It’s a nice gesture, but the amendment does absolutely nothing as the laws currently in place prevent the same thing. Amash’s amendment would have actually put a stop to the wholesale collection of Americans’ phone records.

    Despite the House rejecting Amash’s amendment, the vote was still an important one. It’s the first time Congress has directly voted on the NSA’s spy programs since they were leaked last month by Edward Snowden. It also sets up the next battle against the NSA brewing in both the Senate and the House as lawmakers write up legislation that would either curtail the agency’s actions or make it more transparent. With the knowledge of this vote, opponents of the NSA can now more accurately target those lawmakers who voted in favor of spy agency.

  • Privacy Group Wants Supreme Court To Rule On NSA Phone Metadata Collection

    Are the NSA’s spy programs unconstitutional? One group hopes to convince the Supreme Court that at least one of them is.

    The Hill reports that the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, is planning to file an emergency petition before the Supreme Court regarding the NSA’s collection of phone metadata from wireless carriers. The group argues that the secret FISA court “exceeded its statutory jurisdiction” by allowing the NSA to collect metadata.

    If you recall, phone metadata was the subject of the very first leak to come from Edward Snowden and The Guardian. The leaked document showed a court order that gave the NSA permission to scoop up U.S.-based customers’ metadata from Verizon. Many feel that scooping up metadata, which includes phone numbers and duration of calls, in bulk is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

    So, the question now is whether or not the Supreme Court will hear EPIC’s argument against the NSA’s phone metadata collection program. It could go either way, but I can see the Supreme Court taking it up. Unfortunately, its ruling might not be as satisfactory as it has proven in the past that it’s fine with the government’s surveillance programs.

    In October of last year, the Supreme Court rejected Hepting v. AT&T. It was a class-action lawsuit that sought to remove the immunity provision that allows wireless carriers to share data with the government without fear of being sued if said data is misappropriated. This all took place before the NSA’s spy programs were revealed, but I doubt those revelations would suddenly turn the tables in the peoples’ favor.

    There is a major difference between the Hepting and EPIC cases though. EPIC is petitioning the Supreme Court directly as it’s the only court that has any authority over the secret FISA court. in other words, the Supreme Court can’t knock this argument back down to a lower court. It can, of course, just outright reject the petition, but part of me wants to believe that the Supreme Court would at least listen to the argument.

    EPIC will file its emergency petition today. We’ll keep our ears to the ground and update should the Supreme Court respond.

  • NSA Will Be Collecting Verizon Customers’ Phone Records Daily Until July 19

    Are you on Verizon? If so, your phone records are now in the hands of the government.

    The Guardian got its hands on a secret FISA court order yesterday that reveals Verizon was forced to hand over customer metadata to the NSA. The order, which was granted on April 25, allows the NSA to collect daily information on Verizon’s 98.9 million subscribers until July 19.

    Here’s the relevant part of the leaked court order:

    It is hereby ordered that, the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or “telephony metadata” created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.

    So, what does this metadata include:

    Telephony metadata includes comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call. Telephony metadata does not include the substantive content on any communication, or the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer.

    The metadata being collected by the NSA doesn’t identify you by name, nor does it include your address. What’s the big problem then? The Guardian points out that information included in the metadata would allow the NSA to easily build “a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where.”

    By far, the most worrisome part about this order, however, is its scope. It’s pointed out that FISA court orders are usually issued to track a specific person. It’s rare to see the government collecting information on every single person. It’s also rare to see these orders collecting data from calls between two people in the U.S. FISA was originally established to track communications between those outside of the U.S. or one person in the U.S. communicating with a foreign entity. That is obviously no longer the case.

    It should also worry you that this is order only applies to a single carrier. It’s not out of the realm of reason to assume that there may be similar court orders floating around that compel other carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile and the like to turn over their metadata to the government as well.

    It’s sadly ironic then that all of this comes on the heels of the FCC announcing a vote to decide whether or not wireless carriers can share metadata with third parties. If confirmed, the new rules would require these carriers to seek your permission before sharing your metadata with advertisers, etc. Unfortunately, those same rules wouldn’t protect you when the NSA comes knocking.

  • Harvard to Offer Book Metadata for Search

    Harvard to Offer Book Metadata for Search

    Harvard University is set to release the metadata of over 12 million books, audio recordings, manuscripts, videos, images, maps and other media that presently sit inside its 73 libraries. To clarify, only metadata will be disclosed, as the entire contents of the articles are protected under various intellectual property restrictions. The information will be available for download from Harvard, as well as the Digital Public Library of America.

    The metadata consists of titles, recording and publishing dates, video descriptions, book lengths, etc., and the descriptions alone can be more relevant to search engines regardless, which still rely on metadata when compiling results. David Weinberger, co-director of Harvard’s Library Lab, states, “This is Big Data for books – There might be 100 different attributes for a single object.” Weinberger adds that during a trial run over the course of a day, moderators combed through 600,000 library items, and found that users had created visual timelines on the broad publishing of ideas, as well as “virtual stacks,” showing the locations of various volumes.

    Harvard also plans to add circulation information to the database, though Stuart Shieber, Director of Harvard’s Office of Scholarly Communication, points out – “We have to be careful how we do that, to avoid releasing any personal information.” Obviously, this sort of security breach might shut the entire project down, similar to what has been going on lately with ICANN’s generic top-level domain application system.

    Shieber, who led the project, adds, “This data serves to link things together in ways that are difficult to predict – The more information you release, the more you see people doing innovative things.” Harvard hopes that other libraries will follow its lead, to expand upon this new and unique wealth of intellectual information. The concept of “big data” has been changing the music industry as of late, with companies like musical intelligence platform The Echo Nest capitalizing on the vast accumulations of information compiled on the web, to better align the concept of a sort of culture via content. Harvard’s release of the metadata will likely facilitate a similar new and larger understanding of vast pools of knowledge.

  • YouTube Talks Search Index For Metadata

    YouTube Talks Search Index For Metadata

    Searching for a specific video on YouTube can sometimes be a hassle, especially if it’s newly released. It could take a while for the site to update search results with that new video. There’s a way around that for developers.

    Jeff Posnick, YouTube API team member, issued a pop quiz today on the YouTube API blog. They asked developers to spot the difference between three different URLs. It was found that only one of the URLs returned fresh results whereas the other two would suffer from latency which prevented videos uploaded in the past few hours from showing up.

    This is caused by a request going against the YouTube search index. The index contains cached data whereas the up-to-date information comes from requests that get data directly from their backend database. Posnick offers up some advice on getting a request through to the backend database:

    If your request only includes the max-results and/or start-index query parameters, then it should go against the backend database and the results will be fresh. A few other parameters that change the way the feed is formatted, like prettyprint, callback, or alt, can also be used without triggering the search index. Although it does filter results out of the feed, the fields parameter can also be used while still going against the backend database, because the filtering is performed server-side after the data has been retrieved.

    If your request contains other parameters, there’s a good chance it will end up against the search index. Some common parameters that will always trigger a search are q and orderby.

    The use of either the search index or backend database is reliant upon what you want to do. Posnick says that using search index is great for those that want to get a return on all videos that match “an arbitrary keyword” or “ordering a feed of videos os that they’re sorted by view count.” The backend should be used to gather fresh results or whenever it’s advantageous to do so.

    Developers can also request a specific video from either the backend database or the search index. They use the example of searching for the video ID sOEAD-gfJ_M . Going with the backend, the user is presented with the video straight from the source. Going with the search index searches all metadata containing the video ID and then returns the actual video being searched for.

    The moral of the story – if you want the most up-to-date video metadata, stick to the backend database. If you want to know more about the difference between search index and the backend database, check out the documentation on the matter.

  • Google Video Indexing Videos

    Google Webmaster Central has released a few Youtube clips describing the best methods for indexing video content, to supplement their Webmaster Tools dialogue. Google states that when video content is marked up in the body of the page, search engines and other sites can recognize it, and may use it to improve the display of video content on a page or in search results. Marking up content provides information about videos that allows Google and other sites to index them. Along with a description of common video indexing mistakes webmasters make, Google also added tips on video indexing markup, as well as a clip on video platform restrictions.

    Google also added a clip about schema.org, a set of standards that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have jointly initiated.

    Search engines are utilizing on-page markup in a number of ways. For example, Google uses it to create rich snippets in search results. Not every type of information in schema.org will be surfaced in search results, but over time, one can expect that more data will be used in more ways. Google currently supports rich snippets for people, events, reviews, products, recipes, and breadcrumb navigation, and the new schema.org markup can be used for these types.