Email snooping: What intelligence agencies track

The Obama administration for over two years allowed the National Security Agency to collect enormous amounts of metadata on email usage by Americans, according to one of the latest leaks of government documents by the now-famous whistleblower Edward J Snowden. 

But what is e-mail metadata anyway? It's information about the people you're sending emails to and receiving emails from, and the times that the messages were sent — as opposed to the contents of the messages. It's the digital equivalent of a postal service worker looking at your mail envelope instead of opening it up and reading what's inside. 

That sounds harmless, but it turns out your email metadata can be used to connect the dots of your life story. I learned thisparticipating in Immersion, a project by MIT's Media Laboratory. Immersion is a tool that mines your email metadata and automatically stitches ittogether into an interactive graphic. The result is a creepy spider web showingthe people you've corresponded with, how they know each other, and who your closest friends and professional partners are. 

After entering my Google mail credentials, Immersion took five minutes to stitch together metadataemails going back eight years. A quick glimpse at my results gives an accurate description of my life. 

In an Immersiont, each person is represented by dots. The more you've emailed with the person, the bigger the dot gets. In my results, the biggest dot was my boss at my last job; the second biggest was my long-term former girlfriend. The medium-size ones were some of my closest friends. Lines that connected some dots showed friends of mine who knew each other.