Your Profile, Thanks to NSA

As you are all aware, the NSA has been gathering our email addresses (received and sent) and subject lines. The NSA states that these are metadata and provide little to no intelligence, so we should not worry about violations on our privacy.  If we forget for one moment subject field, the question then is:  Do emails have little value?   

Metadata is data describing other data.  For instance, GPS can be considered metadata.  It provides your location, giving a summary of your full address.  Email addresses are also a metadata.  They contain the name of the senders and their locations: office, company, organization, country, government, or email providers.  In many cases, they pinpoint the sender, the purpose of the email, and location. 

For instance, if you receive an email with Gmail, the email most likely came from a friend or a relative.  On the other hand, if you receive an email that has an extension .gov, the email most likely came from a government branch.  

Knowing what emails contain, how do you use email address

Do you register for websites that you like, and do you get emails from them?

Do you access your banks and credit cards through internet?

Do you pay your bills using the internet?

Do you use different email addresses from work and home?

Do you shop through the internet?

Do you donate through the internet?

Are you a member of an association?

If you answer any of these questions “yes”, then you can see that anyone with access to your email can come up with great insights into who you are.  Contradictory to Brian Fung’s “Everything Gmail Knows about You and Your Friends” in qz.com, email gathering is not only about finding who your friends and colleagues are, but also about creating a profile of you.  

Now, if I had access to your mailbox, and more precisely, to your email addresses, I can tell you what your hobbies are, what your passions are, your approximate age, your income, if you speak other languages beside English, where you live, who you donate to, your school, your job status, your field of work, your religion or lack of religion, and of course, your friends and colleagues.

As you see, there is nothing innocuous in just gathering your senders’ or receivers’ emails.  Unfortunately, we are all helpless against the NSA’s actions.  We only hope that we will not go back to the McCarthy era, where the mere suspicion of being communist destroyed someone's career.  I also hope none of us will have to get the predicament of the main character in the famous Kafka novel, "The Trial", where he is tried and found guilty but he is never told what he is tried for and what he is found guilty of.