Isn't metadata, practically speaking, a subset of content?
Importantly to how we think about communication, no.
Metadata is the signature that accompanies or encapsulates content, viewable to the world. You can completely conceal content, through encryption for example, but you can't completely conceal metadata.
In other words there must be a physical exchange of energy somewhere (communication), and metadata tells you something about how the exchange happened, irrespective and ignorant of what the content is.
From the article, "(Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)".
Could someone let the journalists know what metadata really is? I mean, come on. Metadata is a concise, highly valued description of the data, also including identifying information. In other words, keywords!
For this comment, the keywords (metadata) might be:
I've always understood timing, origin, and destination of a message to be metadata. I'm on the fence about the size of the message. Only the contents themselves are definitely data.
Of course, metadata sometimes contains even more information than the data itself, so framing it as "unimportant" is already incredibly dishonest.
I'm not sure what you mean by conversations, if you mean the content of messages then no that is not metadata, if you mean who talked to whom, then yes that is metadata.
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