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It's really one of the hardest things to get across the importance of metadata during any discussion. For example, it is one (not the only) of the big differences between Whatsapp and Signal. From Zuckerberg we can only trust and hope that conversations are truly encrypted, with Signal (for example) instead it's all out in the open being a project Open source.
We want to start from an article read on Wired which talks about the possibility for Facebook to warn us if we are chatting with a suspicious user, for example a alleged pedophile or a crook. Wow! And how is this possible? Maybe because Facebook does not use end-to-end encrypted chats by default for conversations? To enable conversations secrets in fact it is necessary follow some instructions.
The Wired article however, which is based among other things, on a post on the company blog, says that Facebook will be able to understand whether a person's behavior is suspicious or not although it always uses encrypted chats. How is it possible then? Analyzing metadata.
The importance of metadata
Here they are, the metadata. When we talk about metadata in computer science we are referring to that information that many consider garbage or anyway useless. It's all there is outside of the actual conversation. If it's true (e.g not being programs Open source we can only trust what they say) that the Whatsapp conversations and the Messenger secret chats I am end-to-end encrypted it is also true that metadata is not. What time did you connect, who did you talk to and for how long, what time did you see a message, what time did you open a chat and so on. If you want to learn more how much and what Zuckerberg collects of us you can give it a read to this article (used Mate Translate to translate it if you don't know English)
All this precious information of ours we give them away to the Palo Alto company. All this data is so accurate that Facebook itself lets us know that only through metadata is it possible to distinguish a scammer from a normal user. Only thanks to its own algorithms.
It reminds us a bit of the story that we told you about AirBnb, remember? However, let's not go too deeply into the merits of this decision, it is not something that falls within our control. We just want you to understand the importance of metadata with some practical examples. Because otherwise they always just seem like empty words and conversations between paranoids and/or conspiracy theorists. Metadata, however, they are really important.
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