Trending Now: METADATA

"Spying on thirty million people isn't part of my job description" 

(Lucius Fox, The Dark Knight)

So said Morgan Freeman's character upon discovering that Batman had turned every cellphone in Gotham into a Big Picture surveillance tool using high-frequency sonar. Linked together, Lucius would have the ability to visualize real-time activity anywhere in Gotham. Take a look:

In Christopher Nolan's shadowy morality play, the end justified the means although Lucius resigned in disgust. The debate whether Nolan's screenplay was sympathetic to the Patriot Act aside, I think we've all been prepped for the Big Brother scenario meeting and surpassing Orwellian imagination for some time now.  

This week, the Obama administration defended revelations that the PRISM spy program has accessed Verizon phone logs by saying it is "only" metadata that is neither personal nor obtrusive. The actual content of calls are not monitored; only which phones are being used and when, time and duration of calls, and, perhaps, caller location (I'd wager that at least one NSA analyst has joked that the most recent metadata reveals a spike in the keywords NSA, PRISM, and METADATA). 

 The PRISM logo. Call me maybe?

The NSA prefers metadata, however, because it is more revealing than actual phone conversation. Think of it like a hurricane. At ground level a storm is the very definition of chaos but when viewed by satellite reveals a more predictable order. 

 A clear trending pattern.

Like Batman's High Frequency Generator Receiver, the aggregate picture is more telling than any snapshot.


Uproar over the PRISM program is making a lot of marketing types nervous because they've been profiling us using data mining techniques for years. Though the objectives differ, the methods used to identify consumer patterns and preferences are nearly identical to those used for gathering intelligence. 

Though initially there was great resistance, many of us now willingly provide information to friends and third parties with respect to virtually every aspect of our lives; from circle of friends (Facebook, Google+), tastes in movies (Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes), books (Goodreads), music (iTunes, Spotify, Pandora), restaurants (Yelp), news and sports (Yahoo! Reddit) interests in general (Pinterest), minute-to-minute activities (Facebook, Twitter), queries (Google, Ask, Bing), to our physical location at any given time (Instagram, Facebook, Foursquare).

Maybe too much sharing?

Clearly the issue of the day (if not for the next century) is privacy or lack thereof. We've already seen similar blowback involving Facebook privacy policy and the general consensus seems to be that you shouldn't post anything you wouldn't want to bite you in the ass later. This only addresses buffoonery. What about your identity? Even if you shun social sites your digital fingerprints are everywhere (email, text messages, online and in-person credit card transactions to name a few).

Sure, we're being monitored. But we're doing some monitoring of our own.

For breaking stories, most people now turn to social media for updates. No news organization can be everywhere at once and anyone with a smartphone can now play on-the-scene correspondent. Shortly after the meteorite explosion in Russia I was able to see and learn about the event from multiple perspectives thanks to Twitter and YouTube.

Today we all have Lucius Fox-like access to surveillance tools well beyond anything that was at the NSA's disposal fifty years ago. We can cruise around Google Earth and visit remote homes and villages or zoom in on Street View to see someone's front door or what sort of patio furniture they own. With various apps we can listen in on police scanners or view live camera streams of streets, cities, and taxi rides (here's the scene on Hollywood Blvd right now). Soon, people will be surreptitiously filming everyone with their Google Glass headsets. 

If you're not sure what you or anyone else should be monitoring moment-to-moment, trending charts might be for you. 

Google has taken this to another level with what it cleverly calls Google Trending. 

Hot Searches shows you the most-searched content by day (today it's Man of Steel and Flag Today. Not coincidentally, Man of Steel was released today, which is Flag Day).

Top Charts shows you the most popular searches broken up into strangely rigid categories such as Animals, Drinks, and Chemical Elements.

 
I'm not sure what's going on with tigers but bees and crabs are the hot ticket right now.

A more advanced version of this came from Fisher-Price, which offered hardware that enabled you to both visualize and hear actual sounds made by various animals.

 "The cow says 'Moo.'"

If you're like most Americans, you are probably interested in which Space Objects are trending. The answer may surprise you.

Just kidding. Not surprisingly at all, familiar space objects such as the Moon, Earth, and Sun top the list (already 113 months in the Top Ten and unlikely to be knocked off the charts this millennium). 

Thanks to the Google Hot Search Visualization tool we are all Lucius Fox. It allows you to monitor searches by country or region. Click on the photo below to see the action in real-time.
 

Although I suspect that the Hot Search is rigged in favor of pop culture, it shows that you don't need a sonar thingy or sophisticated algorithms to discover that human beings are depressingly predictable.

That's the trend, anyway.