Classroom Companion: Business

Box 20.4 Metadata, Content, and Privacy
Three concepts that are important in 
the context of data protection are meta-
data, content, and privacy. In clandes-
tine data collection, the purpose is to 
find out as much as possible about the 
message that is intercepted. This 
includes not only access to the plaintext 
data contained in the body of the mes-
sage but also harvesting as much meta-
data about the data traffic as possible.
Metadata (or “data about the data”) 
includes identities of the sender/origin 
and the receiver/destination, URLs 
identifying the type of content, type of 
message (WWW message, email, file 
transfer, VoIP, streaming service, etc.), 
protocol details (IP, UDP, TCP, and 
tunneling headers, service initiation 
protocols, encryption method, etc.), 
length of the message, and the time the 
message was sent or intercepted. Even 
if the content of data cannot be read, 
the metadata may provide the secret 
services with information from which 
 
Chapter 20 · Big Data Economics

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they may infer political, criminal, or 
other activities by using artificial intel-
ligence or big data algorithms for dis-
covering patterns in the data steam.
Content is the information con-
tained in the data field of the message, 
for example, the text in an email, bank 
account details and the amount trans-
ferred in a bank transaction, search 
words in a web search, and the content 
of a file.
Privacy is the act of hiding the 
information. This includes encryption 
of information stored on hard discs and 
information sent over the Internet. The 
most common encryption method used 
to hide the content of Internet mes-
sages is Transport Layer Security (TLS) 
encrypting the body of the message 
(e.g., the https protocol used for protec-
tion of web messages). Better protec-
tion is provided by IPsec used in Private 
Virtual Networks supporting secured 
communications within and between 
geographically distributed organiza-
tions. Metadata such as addresses and 
protocol types are not protected by 
these methods.
Addresses may be kept secret by 
using the onion router (Tor) where the 
address of the sender is anonymized. 
This reduces the value of the metadata 
collected from such messages because it 
is not possible to correlate sender and 
receiver of the messages. Tor is also used 
in the dark web together with encryption 
to hide information and make transac-
tions untraceable. The dark web is used 
by terrorists, criminals, and hackers and 
for other illegal purposes, as well as for 
legal purposes such as protection against 
industrial espionage. If it is observed 
that frequent interactions take place 
between two companies during a short 
period, a competitor may conclude that 
a new business relationship (e.g., a 
merger) is planned.
Note that information may be sent 
in plaintext in local networks and only 
be encrypted when sent on the open 
Internet, so that tapping the informa-
tion is still possible. This possibility is 
sometimes used (or misused) by the 
management of some firms to control 
that the staff is not using the Internet 
for private purposes.