Skip to main content

Uh oh! Connecting your phone metadata to your real name is surprisingly easy

Why does the NSA need your phone records
bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock

Since the first round of NSA programs leaked by Edward Snowden hit the press in June, the Obama administration and the spy agency have maintained that its practice of collecting the phone metadata of every phone call in the United States is not a violation of privacy.

“What [one NSA program] does is it gets data from the service providers – like a Verizon – in bulk,” President Obama explained to PBS News’ Charlie Rose in a June interview. “And basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names, there’s no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place.”

Recommended Videos

True though that may be, researchers at Stanford University have proven that the same metadata that Obama paints as unrevealing can be easily linked to callers’ names – doing so is as simple as performing a Google search.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Stanford Security Lab, used phone call metatdata collected through a specially developed Android app called MetaPhone, through which users voluntarily gave the researchers access to their call records. As researcher Patrick Mutchler explains in a blog post about the study, the team randomly pulled 5,000 numbers from the MetaPhone data pool, then searched them through Google Places, Yelp, and Facebook directories.

“With little marginal effort and just those three sources – all free and public – we matched 1,356 (27.1 percent) of the numbers,” wrote Mutchler. “Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6 percent) on Yelp, 684 (13.7 percent) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3 percent) on Facebook.”

Presuming the NSA has more money and manpower to put into this kind of search analysis, the team then reduced the number of random phone numbers to 100 and spent less than an hour searching them through Google. Of those numbers, the team was able to link 60. “When we add in our three initial sources, we were up to 73,” Mutchler explains.

The team then used a relatively inexpensive data broker service, Intelius, to take their search one step further. That effort brought the total up to 91 phone numbers linked to real names.

“If a few academic researchers can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of American phone numbers,” wrote Mutchler.

While metadata does not expose the contents of calls or other communications, experts believe it can be used to derive far more information about people than reading an email or listening in on a phone call can. It is for this reason, among others, that a federal judge recently decided that the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata collection is likely unconstitutional.

For those of you interested in helping further Stanford’s study of metadata, you can download an updated version of MetaPhone here.

(via Threat Post)

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
Wacom’s new tablet sees its biggest redesign in over a decade
wacoms new tablet sees biggest redesign in decade wacomintuospro med flairgrip inuse wired closeup markusbledowski

At CES 2025, I had the chance to go behind-the-scenes with Wacom and take a look at the new Intuos Pro tablet. Let me be clear about something upfront: I am no artist. Even my stick figures look like they want to be put out of their misery. Despite my complete inability to hold a pencil correctly, the Intuos Pro demonstrated exactly why this new tablet is so beneficial to users.

The Intuos Pro doesn't have a screen of its own. Instead, this tablet is designed to go with its user anywhere they need and connect to whatever display they happen to use at the time. Depending on an artist's field of work, they might choose to work on specifically-calibrated monitors. That might disqualify a tablet with a built-in screen, but the Intuos Pro isn't picky about the machine it connects with.

Read more
I’ve found a perfect use for the Galaxy Ring, but I can’t recommend it
The Samsung Galaxy Ring on someone's hand.

People seem to have polar reactions to smart rings. Some love them, like Digital Trends' Andy Boxall. Others, like former Digital Trends contributor Joe Maring, found that they simply couldn't abide wearing one all the time. So when I decided to buy the Samsung Galaxy Ring for a number of reasons, I alays knew it would really be an experiment with whether I would take to wearing a ring or not.

The results are in, and I am firmly in the camp of those who don't really get smart rings. For the last few months, my Galaxy Ring has largely found itself relegated to its charging box.

Read more
Why I’m sad this delightful iPhone camera is about to go away
OuttaFocus promotional image.

When Apple replaces the current iPhone SE (2022) with a new version, it seems increasingly likely it’ll mark the end of an era, because the SE as we know it is the only current iPhone still available with a 12-megapixel camera on the back. Once a mainstay of all iPhones, the 12MP camera is about to be completely superseded by the 48MP camera. You may be surprised to hear I’m going to miss it, so let me explain why.
The end is near

Several months after the iPhone SE (2022) came out, Apple released the iPhone 14 series and it put a 12MP camera on the non-Pro models, just as it had done since the iPhone 6S. While you can still buy the iPhone 14 new today, it was the last brand new device to launch with a 12MP camera, and when the iPhone 15 came along all the models received a 48MP main camera. Unlike the iPhone 14, the iPhone SE (2022) has lived on as a current phone since then, and is only now about to be replaced.

Read more