ADVERTISEMENTAre you curious to see how PRISM gathers all that information about millions of e-mails sent every day?
An MIT’s application, called Immersion, visualizes how the data is being stored and categorized according to the relationship within the data itself.
National Journal’s technology writer Brian Fung reported that Google’s information is available with the use of Immersion, on government request.
Then, Immersion goes through your Gmail account and reports all the data collected using effective visualization tools.
It displays the results as a sort of bubble chart showing who you trade email with the most. Also, it highlights the relationship between those people.
If you want, you can try it yourselves. Just click on Immersion.
First, you will get preliminary results and then more details as the data is analyzed further. This information is available for Google as the company searches for keywords within your email.
So, the data is used for advertising but Google not only knows all the information in your metadata, but also knows what is contained in your email.
Now, if the NSA request data from your email account they will be able to see something similar to Immersion’ graph.
Also, you have to consider that NSA will probably see all of your email addresses and not just Gmail. Thus, the metadata retrieved is examined along with the metadata from everyone you’ve corresponded with.