MIT's Immersion tool reveals everything Gmail knows about you and your friends
Article first appeared in the nationaljournal.com:
When Google hands over e-mail records to the government, it includes basic envelope information, or metadata, that reveals the names and e-mail addresses of senders and recipients in your account.
The feds can then mine that information for patterns that might be useful in a law-enforcement investigation.
What kind of relationships do they see in an average account? Thanks to the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, now you can find out. They've developed a tool called Immersion that taps into your Gmail and displays the results as an interactive graphic.
The chart depicts all of your contacts as nodes, and the gray lines between those nodes represent connections between people by e-mail. The larger the circle, the more prominent that person is in your digital life.
A word of warning for the privacy conscious: To use the service, you need to give MIT permission to analyze your e-mail metadata. Once you've done so, it'll take a few minutes to compile everything. When you're done, you're given the option to delete your metadata from MIT's servers.
Currently you can only login to Immersion through your Gmail account. By clicking the login button you grant Immersion access to the metadata of your emails. Though Immersion is able to quickly process your information (up to 10,000 emails in 10 minutes) you may have to wait a bit before the app retrieves your information if you try to login to the service now. Immersion is gaining steam on the internet and with the current influx of data requests it is serving users on a first-come, first-served basis.
Once Immersion loads your data it will display colored nodes connected by lines. Each node represents a collaborator, or a person with whom you've exchanged at least three emails. Each line represents communication between those people. The resulting graph groups your contacts into clusters of people who've had contact with each other. In my Immersion graph, for example, I see my college friends grouped in one cluster and my colleagues grouped in another. Even the small group of elementary school friends I am still in touch with make up a small cluster in my graph. You can also click single nodes to map your common contacts with individuals and to discover how long you've been emailing each person and how you were introduced.
What you see in my chart are five and a half years' worth of e-mails. The yellow circles indicate family and close family friends. All of my college friends are in red, and my D.C. friends are in green. Blue nodes denote my colleagues at The Atlantic; pink, my coworkers at National Journal; and gray, people who generally don't share connections with the other major networks in my life.
In all, MIT counted 606 "collaborators" in my inbox, totaling some 83,000 e-mails. But you can also break down that data by year, month, or even the past week. Pretty amazing stuff—and a good reminder not only how much information Google knows about you, but what that information can uncover about other people. If you can learn this much just from looking at one account, imagine what crunching hundreds or thousands of interconnected accounts must be like.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/a-hypnotic-visualization-of-everything-gmail-knows-about-you-and-your-friends-20130705
http://dashburst.com/mit-immersion-visual-gmail-personal-networks/
http://www.boston.com/2013/06/29/SZbsH6c8tiKtdCxTdl5TWM/singlepage.html
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/07/01/197632066/an-mit-project-that-lets-you-spy-on-yourself?ft=1&f=93559255&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter