I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.

You may opt-out by clicking here Edit Story Jul 10, 2013, 02:20pm EDT Heres A Tool To See What Your Email Metadata Reveals About You Kashmir Hill Former Staff Tech Welcome to The Not-So Private Parts where technology privacy collide This article is more than 7 years old.

Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Earlier this week, Mike Masnick of Techdirt complained that anyone who dismisses the NSAs collection of metadata around peoples phone calls and emails (as revealed in the Snowden Leaks ) because its just metadata doesnt know what metadata is.

The argument is that you can learn a lot about who a person associates with and what they might talk about without actually reading their emails or listening to their phone calls.

Coincidentally, MIT Media Lab released a tool this month that allows people to analyze their own email metadata.

Called Immersion, it scrapes a users Gmail account looking only at the metadata (From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields of the emails) to present an overview of their network.

The team tells me that 210,000 people have run the tool so far.

Im one of them. Heres my own Immersion chart showing my network dating back to 2004, when I started using Gmail.

Ive removed my contacts names (for privacy reasons) but labeled some of the nodes and clusters.

Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at MIT, was less inhibited in sharing his contacts.

Significant others are easy to identify and its quite easy to find some of my story sources -- which could potentially be interesting to a snooper -- as they were disconnected from the rest of my networks.

Even though its just metadata, getting that perspective on my social network was almost as poignant as time traveling through old emails and gchats -- an experience described too well in this Thought Catalog post from 2011.

It helps explore privacy by showing users data that they have already shared with others, says the site.

The other party that the user has already shared hisher data with in this case would be Google, as we are currently using Gmail as the email provider, says Deepak Jagdish of the MIT Media Lab by email.

Google infamously made its users most intimate clusters of Gmail contacts public when it launched the social network Buzz -- a privacy mistake it came to regret.

And of course, its now becoming evident that those trails are of interest to intelligence agencies.

So, what does the Immersion team plan to do with all this valuable metadata handed over to it by navel-gazing users.

Apart from that, in the future we also plan to calculate some aggregate statistics for all the users who have saved their Immersion profile, but at no point will we publish any data of any personalized form.

Kashmir Hill Im a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information.

If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khil Read More Im a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information.

If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khillforbes.com.

PGP key here.

I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington Burling -- a Cliffs Notes version of law school.

In the past, Ive been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C.

Washington Examiner.

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