Algorithm and metadata miscellany
If you tweet about your life, a new algorithm can identify your most significant events and assemble them into an accurate life history, say the computer scientists who built it.
Is there an algorithm for love?
Amy Webb reverse-engineered online dating.
So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text – a newspaper story – that has no chance of being repurposed.
“Metadata = surveillance. If you hired a private detective to put someone under surveillance, they’d see who they spoke to, where they went, what they bought. That’s metadata. When the president says ‘it’s just metadata’, he’s saying “it’s surveillance”
Privacy and surveillance: Jacob Applebaum, Caspar Bowden and more