If you used the instant-messaging system MSN messenger in June 2006, all your chats were being collected and being passed (anonymised, of course) to researchers at Microsoft Research, a paper in the physics pre-print server arXiv reveals.
But their results aren't headline grabbing - they show people are more likely to chat with others in the same geographical location, age group and of the same sex. As the arXiv blogger points out, more interesting is the fact the researchers struggled with the size of their dataset:
"The sheer size of the data limits the kinds of analyses one can perform," they write. The 4.5 terabytes of chat logs took 12 hours to copy onto an eight-processor server for processing.
The US security services have made moves to assemble databases of online communication that will surely dwarf that - watching over phone calls, social networking sites and emails.
Extracting useful information - not just generalities like the study mentioned above - is going to require massive amounts of storage and processing power. The spying game just isn't the same any more. How long before James Bond is seen acting on a tip-off from network theorists with ranked armies of servers at their backs?
Tom Simonite, online technology reporter
But their results aren't headline grabbing - they show people are more likely to chat with others in the same geographical location, age group and of the same sex. As the arXiv blogger points out, more interesting is the fact the researchers struggled with the size of their dataset:
"The sheer size of the data limits the kinds of analyses one can perform," they write. The 4.5 terabytes of chat logs took 12 hours to copy onto an eight-processor server for processing.
The US security services have made moves to assemble databases of online communication that will surely dwarf that - watching over phone calls, social networking sites and emails.
Extracting useful information - not just generalities like the study mentioned above - is going to require massive amounts of storage and processing power. The spying game just isn't the same any more. How long before James Bond is seen acting on a tip-off from network theorists with ranked armies of servers at their backs?
Tom Simonite, online technology reporter
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