Question

Traffic data reveals huge amount about one private life. They are your electronic footprints, but unlike the physical fingerprints you leave around in the real world, they are recorded. For land line phone calls it can reveal the number you dialed, the duration of the call and the time of the call. Traffic data includes a record of the location of the cell phone in question as it moves about from cell to cell. For this reason, traffic data generated by mobile calls are far more personal and revealing. In relation to the internet, traffic data would encompass the email address on all correspondence to and from the subscriber, a record of date, time, and size of message as well as other transmission details but hopefully excluding message subject and content. It would also encompass a record of every login session, every webpage visited and read, every search term entered, every file downloaded, every purchase made, and so forth- in short, virtually the entirely of one’s online “session” but hopefully excluding the content of e-mail messages. (Meade 2003)

Discuss the quote by Meade 2003.Tell me what you believe Meade is trying to convey about the content of email messages?

Answer 1

Traffic data is very helpful to track various records of a called or emailer to judge the inflow and outflow of calls or messages thereby also detect risks of sending or recieving content which may be possible spam or virus. Having said that it also put the user at risk as lot of personal messages, details are shared through phone and email which can be hacked becuase of which nowadays most of the apps and email providers have message/call encryption to safeguard the privacy of the user.

Meade is implying that we as users circulate varied kind of data via phone, online messaging, email etc which might be perosnal and the traffic data hopefully recives these as encrypted as a security policy. However that does not mean we circulate information or data on phone or email which can be offensive, racist or abusive also keeping in mind personal information. To prevent hacking ro misuse of this data the traffic database has encryption and also all apps emails these days give security codes, password management and advise not to share passwords with anyone and periodically change them for security purposes. On one hand where we know traffic data has access to all information we as users also should be aware of what we share and to whom and avoid spamming and circulation of abusive or offensive matter.