[Vision2020] A quick rant about the term "metadata"

[Paul Rumelhart]

As a computer science guy, this bugs me.

I've seen the term "metadata" abused in the news media and online often 
in relation to phone data the NSA is sucking up wholesale.

"Metadata", as the media is using the term, *is* data.  Things like 
phone numbers, dates, times, duration of calls, cell phone tower 
identifiers, etc *is* data.

The term "metadata" has a specific meaning, it's data about data. For 
example, metadata on the data that Verizon was forced to give over would 
look something like this:

Field                     Data Type  Size  Comment
Originating Phone Number  NUMBER     10
Called Number             NUMBER     10
Call Duration             NUMBER     4      Length of call in seconds
Date of Call              CHAR       10     Date format: MM/DD/YYYY
Time of Call              CHAR       12     Time format: HH24:MI:SS.nnn
...

And so on.  I couldn't care less if they grabbed the metadata from all 
the phone carriers.  It would be a bunch of database table descriptions.

Don't kid yourself, what they grabbed from the telcos was actual data, 
and valuable data at that.

Paul