Correct I believe that’s literally where the term came from - it’s aggregating the full set of accessible information about a person into a document for sharing it and helping people locate them in meatspace.
Here, in this conversaion, the discussion is about the visceral need that people have to categorize and place other people into databases. It's not about lists of things.
that's totally ignoring what I said. I hope you feel smug about it.
Edit: Interestingly, wiktionary says informations is just uncommon, and that information is not data, it's the meaning of data, in the computing context. ... with source. It links to a paper about an ISO standard, no less, that tries to define vocabulary and happens to use data as singular. Document Reader [is a] Character reader whose input data is the text from specific areas on a given type of form [1]. (This makes me so happy right now.)
Overall, if it's a technical term they invented, the authors are free to name their language construct whatever they want. But if it's so fudged that the author even writes datums ... I rest my case.
Yeah, it includes mechanical specifications of physical media so, say, alien archaeologists can get data off a VHS.
People are reading the title thinking it's about filesystems. It's about cataloging all human information storage methods, from phonographs to zip drives to word perfect files.
Correct. Those should be simply referred as "records of who electronically contacted whom and what, including when and how." Then it doesn't sound so unimportant.
"Metadata" is a real-life Newspeak word, just like Orwell writes, chosen so that "a thought diverging should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."
The value of meta-data is why people tag friends in photos and cameras geocode. It's called meta-data because it sits above data in the information hierarchy - just as a digital photograph sits above the bits and bytes on disk from which its image is composed.
"Honey, it's bad news," or "Darling, I need you to hold me," or "<sobbing>" don't say squat...unless you know they were made from the doctor's office and what calls were made afterwards.
If I remember right from when I worked there (years ago), the wording is "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." I can definitely see interpretations of that which require direct and open access to the raw data and others which just require universal and useful access to an assistive/suggestive product or service that leverages the data.
To be clear, I prefer the first interpretation, but I realize open data geeks (and those who would use the raw data if granted access) are far fewer than ML geeks (and those who enjoy the automagic suggestions) and the gap is only widening.
I’m trying to think of a physical-world analogy to this:
Imagine walking into a government office and seeing a table in the lobby with different stacks of documents. Some stacks are labeled and some are not. You can take a copy of each document you’re looking for, and you find it because of the label, but what happens if you take an unlabeled document? Maybe you’re just curious and nobody said you couldn’t look at the other documents. If the documents were that important, surely they wouldn’t just be sitting on this public table.
" by providing a place for users to optionally access context and authoritative speech when they want it. This means that such functionality could even be required by law, just as nutrition facts are for foods. It might be required for all messaging and social media apps over a certain size, built into operating systems, or mandated through Apple App and Google Play stores."
"Oi do you have a loicense for that decontextualized piece of information?"
It's silly because the specific examples you gave, which websites you visit and who you e-mail, are both deeply personal and speak to the innermost thoughts of a person. Attempting to trivialize the impact of their disclosure by calling them "metadata"[0] is detrimental to everyone but the police.
Physical-to-digital analogies are very dangerous in a lawmaking setting because lawmakers rarely understand the implications of applying a physical power they wield in the digital realm. Examples include the lobbyist-proposed law allowing IP owners to infiltrate others' computers and delete ostensibly stolen files, while simultaneously destroying the entire concept of digital security, and the DMCA making it illegal to recycle printer cartridges or switch cellular carriers.
[0] Yes, I know that is the technical term for data about data, but there are plenty of examples where technical terms and legal terms differ in definition, intent, and hidden implications.
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