Via Immersion; Email map of an individual over 6.5 years.
The NSA keeps telling us that they aren’t collecting the Internet data of U.S. citizens or individuals living in America. But, you ask, what about the data from Boundless Informant—the NSA’s internal analytics tool which can break down surveillance by specific country and surveillance program—that lists almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence gathered from U.S. computer networks in March? Or the fact that training materials for the NSA say that accidental collection of U.S. content is “nothing to worry about”? Well, you’ll just have to trust them on it. They promise that they’ll play nice and not collect our data. And they’re a trustworthy bunch over there, it’s not like they would ever lie (especially under oath in a Senate hearing).
But theoretically, let’s say that while defending our freedom and security they happened to accidentally collect your data. What would that data look like? Well, we can’t be entirely sure—the NSA won’t tell us because transparency makes it harder defend our freedoms and securities and whatnots—but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab have developed a tool called Immersion to try approximate what collected email data may look like.
Representing your contacts with nodes—colored circles that are scaled in relation to how important they are to your digital life—the software also shows links between different individuals. You can change the data map to show anywhere from your last seven hours of activity to the entire lifespan of your email account. Clicking on a contact’s node reveals a more detailed version of that individual’s connections, complete with all shared connections, a list of who they introduced you to and who they were introduced by, volume of mail you’ve sent to and received from that person, when you were first put in touch by email, when you last had email contact, and a graph of your interaction over time.
It’s fascinating software, but here’s a disclaimer: You’ll have to grant MIT access to your Gmail so it can collect the metadata it needs. You can delete the information they sift through, but it still might feel shady to allow a major university to look through your email. Then again, unlike the NSA, at least they’ll ask for permission first.