What the NSA Might Have Wanted to Learn From Tracking Your Phone

The National Security Agency’s experiments with gathering up location data it was intended to see how the location data would work with its existing systems. The question is, had the agency taken it operational, what did it expect to learn?

An MIT paper on the use of metadata said: “By continually logging and time-stamping information about a user’s activity, location, and proximity to other users, the large-scale dynamics of collective human behavior can be analyzed.” In short, tracking your phone is pretty good way to figure out who you know, where you’ve been, who you may have talked to. Such data could have been used to prevent epidemic outbreaks such as bird flu or malaria.