Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information

Level 3 l Advanced
1 Warmer
Think about who you last phoned and who last phoned you. If possible, look on your phone at the list of
your most recent calls, both made and received.
What information might someone be able to gather about you from your calls? For example, who your
family is, where you live, where you work, what services you use …

2 Key words
Find the key words and phrases in the article and write them next to the definitions below. The paragraph
numbers are given to help you.

1. a record of things that have happened ___________________________________ (para 1)

2. a set of data that describes and gives information about other data
___________________________________ (para 2)

3. using or having a very small amount of money ___________________________________ (para 8)

4. small groups that are close to each other ___________________________________ (para 8)

5. considered or discussed why something is as it is ___________________________________ (para 8)

6. looked for information by searching through something thoroughly ___________________________________

(two words, para 9)

7. formed an opinion based on information available ___________________________________ (para 9)

8. the person who you are married to or are having a romantic relationship with
___________________________________ (two words, para 9)

9. learn small pieces of information by asking questions, or watching or listening carefully

___________________________________ (para 10)

10. brief, interesting descriptions ___________________________________ (para 10)

11. the basic rights that all citizens have to do or say what they want, as long as they do not break the law or affect
other people’s rights ___________________________________ (two words, para 12)

12. systematic computer analysis of data ___________________________________ (para 13)

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NEWS LESSONS / Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information / Advanced
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Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information
Level 3 l Advanced
Even basic phone logs can reveal
deeply personal information,
researchers find
Stanford study shows how details gleaned from
telephone ‘metadata’ by National
Security Agency pose a threat to privacy of
ordinary citizens
Ian Sample, science editor
16 May, 2016
1 The mass collection of telephone records by
government surveillance programmes poses a
clear threat to the personal privacy of ordinary
citizens, according to US researchers who used
basic phone logs to identify people and uncover
confidential information about their lives.
2 Armed with anonymous “metadata” on people’s
calls and texts, but not the content of the
communications, two scientists at Stanford
University worked out individuals’ names, where
they lived and the names of their partners. But
that was not all.
3 The same data led them to uncover potentially
sensitive information about some individuals.
One man was found to own a rifle, while
another had recently been diagnosed with an
irregular heartbeat. Other data pointed to a new
pregnancy and a person with multiple sclerosis.
4 The results highlight the extraordinary power of
telephone metadata – the number called, when
and for how long – particularly when it is paired
with public information available from services
such as Google, Yelp and Facebook. The value
of the data, which is not subject to the same
legal protections as the content of people’s
communications, has long been recognized
by the security services. As Stewart Baker,
the former general counsel at the US National
Security Agency (NSA), put it in the aftermath
of Edward Snowden’s revelations: “Metadata
absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s
life.”
5 Patrick Mutchler, a computer security researcher
at Stanford, said that while the power of
metadata was understood by those gathering
the information, the public was largely in the dark
because so few published studies have revealed
how rich the data is. “That makes it difficult
for people with strong opinions about these
programmes to fight them. Now, we have hard
© Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2016
NEWS LESSONS / Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information / Advanced
evidence we can point to that didn’t exist in the
past,” he said.
6 For the study, the researchers signed up 823
people who agreed to have metadata collected
from their phones through an Android app.
The app also received information from their
Facebook accounts, which the scientists used
to check the accuracy of their results. In all, the
researchers gathered metadata on more than
250,000 calls and over 1.2m texts.
7 Analysts who logged into the NSA’s
metadata-gathering system were initially allowed
to examine data up to three hops away from
an individual. A call from the target individual’s
phone to another number was one hop. From that
phone to another was two hops. And so on. The
records available to analysts stretched back for
five years. The collection window has now been
restricted to two hops and 18 months at most.
8 Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, Mutchler describes how,
on a shoestring budget, he and fellow graduate
student, Jonathan Mayer, uncovered a wealth
of personal information, some of it sensitive,
about people who took part in the study. Through
automatic and manual searches, they identified
82% of people’s names. The same technique
gave them the names of businesses the people
had called. When these were plotted on a map,
they revealed clusters of local businesses, which
the scientists speculated surrounded the person’s
home address. In this way, they named the city
people lived in 57% of the time, and were nearly
90% accurate in placing people within 50 miles of
their home. Mutchler believes some of the misses
came from people not updating their Facebook
page when they moved out of their parents’
home, for example, to go to college.
9 The scientists next delved into more personal
territory. Using a simple computer program to
analyse people’s call patterns, they inferred who
among the study volunteers was in a relationship.
Once they knew the owner of a particular number
had a partner, identifying the significant other was
easy, they report.
10 For the final part of the study, the researchers
delved even deeper, to see what sensitive
information they could glean from telephone
metadata. They gathered details on calls made
to and from a list of organizations, including
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Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information
Level 3 l Advanced
hospitals, pharmacies, religious groups, legal programmes, like the NSA’s, will necessarily
services, firearms retailers and repair firms. From expose highly confidential information about
these, they pieced together some extraordinary ordinary citizens,” the scientists write, adding: “To
vignettes from people’s lives. strike an appropriate balance between national
security and civil liberties, future policymaking
11 The metadata from one person in the study
must be informed by input from relevant
showed they had a long call from a cardiology
sciences.”
centre, spoke briefly with a medical laboratory,
answered a number of short calls from a local 13 Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering
pharmacy and then made calls to a hotline at Cambridge University, said the study provided
for abnormal heart-rate monitoring devices. numbers that discussions can now be based
Another participant made frequent calls to a on. “With the right analytics running over nation-
local gun supplier that specialized in semi- scale communications data, you can infer huge
automatic rifles and later placed a number of amounts of sensitive information on everyone.
long calls to the customer support hotline run We always suspected that, of course, but here’s
by a major gun manufacturer that produced the the data.”
rifles. The metadata from two others suggested
© Guardian News and Media 2016
one had multiple sclerosis and the other had
First published in The Guardian, 16/05/16
just become pregnant.
12 “All of this should be taken as an indication of
what is possible with two graduate students and
limited resources,” said Mutchler, who argues
that the findings should make policymakers
think twice before authorizing mass surveillance
programmes. “Large-scale metadata surveillance

3 Comprehension check
Answer the questions using information from the article.
1. Who carried out the research and where?
2. How many volunteers took part in the research?
3. How was the metadata for the research collected?
4. How much and what kind of metadata was collected?
5. What was the metadata paired with to make it even more detailed and revealing?
6. What sort of personal information about the volunteers were the researchers able to obtain easily?
7. How might the results of this research affect mass data gathering in the future?
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NEWS LESSONS / Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information / Advanced
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 Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information
Level 3 l Advanced
4 Expressions
Reorder the words in the box to make expressions from the article, then write them next to their meanings.
Find them in the article to see who or what they are used in connection with.

a be a balance dark in
pose the think threat twice strike

1. _____________________________ (three words) – present a danger

2. _____________________________ (four words) – not know very much about something because other
people are keeping it secret from you

3. _____________________________ (three words) – accept neither of two extreme positions or things but find
a solution that is reasonable and fair

4. _____________________________ (two words) – carefully consider whether what you are planning to do is a
good idea

5 Collocations
a. What adjectives and verbs appear together with information in the article?

information

b. Use the collocations you have found to talk about the article.

6 Discussion
• How easy do you think it would it be for someone to find out about your life with basic information
from your phone and social media profiles?
• By using mobile phones and social media, are we knowingly allowing government agencies access to
our personal information?
• What can we do to keep our personal information private?
• What could happen if companies or advertising agencies got hold of our data?
• Are there any positive repercussions of someone having access to our personal data?
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NEWS LESSONS / Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information / Advanced
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Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information
Level 3 l Advanced
KEY
1 Warmer 4 Expressions

Teacher’s tip: During this task, students should not
share any specific personal information unless they
really want to. A general summary would be enough
(omitting any calls they want to keep private). They
might say something like, ‘Half of the calls are from my
daughter and my husband’ or ‘I called my hairdresser
and got a call from the optician.’
1. pose a threat (to the personal privacy of
ordinary citizens)
2. be in the dark (the public are in the dark)
3. strike a balance (between national security and
civil liberties)
4. think twice (before authorizing mass
surveillance programmes)

2 Key words 5 Collocations

a.
1. log reveal
2. metadata personal
3. shoestring uncover
4. clusters confidential
5. speculated sensitive
public
6. delved into
gather
7. inferred receive
8. significant other
9. glean
10. vignettes
11. civil liberties
12. analytics

3 Comprehension check

1. two scientists at Stanford University in the US

2. 823
3. from their phones using an android app
4. 250,000 phone calls and over 1.2 million texts
5. public information available from services such as
Google, Yelp and Facebook
6. name, name of partner, where they lived, facts
about their health, businesses they used, things
they bought, etc
7. Policymakers will need to consider carefully before
authorizing mass surveillance programmes as
these will reveal confidential information about
ordinary citizens. Additionally, the research has
provided information that can be used as the basis
for further discussions about surveillance.
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NEWS LESSONS / Basic phone logs reveal deeply personal information / Advanced
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