Intrigued by two recent articles by Lapidos and Chen, I've taken myself to the MIT media program called "Immersion". "... it only works with Gmail and you have to reveal your password...but, unlike Google, or the NSA, the project also offers an instant deletion option: Remove your name, and it erases your metadata.” I couldn't resist. I forward all of my older email accounts (University of Wisconsin, etc.) to gmail, so it gives a good picture of my email contacts. Below I show the graphic of my modest contact network, with names deleted. And, of course, I've now erased the data and withdrawn the access permissions. While doing this, I was astounded to see the list of widgets (I was completely unaware of) that have access to all my google data. I started to delete a few, but gave up after awhile. I assume the NSA has a vastly more complete picture, which is not being deleted! And - whistling in the dark - I hope that nothing I do could possibly be of interest to security snoops.
