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While I see and agree with your point (you can derive a lot of information from just meta-data), this is where you go overboard:

The conclusions which can be drawn from that meta-data are far more solid than can be drawn from listening in to any or all of the phone calls.

You cannot derive more information from meta-data than you can from the data itself. That's why we call it meta-data. "Honey, I may have cancer, I'm making an appointment with Dr. O. N'conlogist as soon as possible." is more compact, just as complete, and is more tolerant to missing parts.

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It's also not necessarily correct or trustworthy. However, if you not only say "Honey, I may have cancer", and then go to the doctor and do research and go to the doctor again, and call your loved ones more often than you used to, and continue going to the doctor, now we know it's not just some conversational sarcasm or paranoia that the surveillance programs need to sift through, now we know you're serious, and you're worried, and you're dealing with it.

The value of meta-data is why people tag friends in photos and cameras geocode. It's called meta-data because it sits above data in the information hierarchy - just as a digital photograph sits above the bits and bytes on disk from which its image is composed.

"Honey, it's bad news," or "Darling, I need you to hold me," or "<sobbing>" don't say squat...unless you know they were made from the doctor's office and what calls were made afterwards.

This is missing the point that the meta-data is often less, not more, information. Now, if you have enough it can still be useful. But we are specifically talking about less, here. Giving someone more information is giving them more information. Period.

Consider, knowing that someone went to Walmart around noon doesn't say much. They could have done a lot. Knowing they specifically bought ____, is a different matter.

Hell, that is the entire point to this. You are having to aggregate lots of meta-data to determine the data of the call itself. How is this even an argument?

The data of the call isn't important. That's the point. What you say matters less than what you do. And you do a lot more than you say.

To put it another way, Google doesn't know that I am interested in a new iPod because the I used Gmail to tell my friends, "I'm interested in a new iPod." They know it because I have been browsing pages offering iPods for sale. And that says a lot more about when I plan to purchase one than the statement sent via Gmail.

I didn't tell Kroger, "Hey, I've got a dog." I bought dogfood - and now that Witty is dead, they can tell from the change in my purchase habits that my big dog died - they don't print me coupons for Alpo anymore when I check out.

The content of the call indeed contains information beyond the meta-data about the call. But it's not just meta-data about voice calls that's being collected, it's meta-data about all modes of mobile and static communications - and geolocations when calls are not being made.

But even in your example the content of the pages is what's important, and that is data, not metadata. Metadata might be stuff like "the search for '$FOO' was done from IP address '$BAR' at time '$BAZ'". And you could even argue that $FOO itself is really data, not meta-data.

Likewise the contents of your receipt is data, not metadata. It's literally the bill of goods that authorizes you to take the named items from the store and (with your additional purchase creds) authorized Kroger to charge your credit card $X.XX. Kroger may have inferred more than you wished, but they did it with the data.

One man's data is another man's meta-data.

My receipt is not the items I purchased. It is information about them. E.g.

    Power Systems: Conversations on Global
    Democratic Uprisings and the New 
    Challenges to U.S. Empire,                 $18.75

is not the text itself. It is information about something I did, not something I read or might have read or might read.

Likewise, my purchase of dogfood was not dogfood, nor my dog nor my feeding of it.

It's turtles all the way up.

'Information' is also a meta-data of that "meta-data" above, which one is more useful? Can anyone tell what you did when given meta-data of "information"?

Can you derive back to what you did, given 'information' as meta-data?

If it's turtles all the way up then it's turtles all the way down.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that metadata is not warrant-protected, so I'd be highly leery of equating data with metadata. (edit: spelling fix)

That you can determine things in multiple ways is a given. You can often infer the information of the calls. Often with decent accuracy. If you have that information, there is no need to infer it.

Take your Kroger example. You could have just stopped buying dog food from them. We completely stopped buying dog food from a store because we had trouble getting the dogs to take to the food without skin problems. Is it valid for them to assume that our dog is dead? Or just stick with the safe assumption that we aren't buying dog food from them anymore? :)

Now, I completely agree with the idea that collecting just the meta data is already pretty far reaching. I struggle to see why collecting it all is not even more far reaching.

It may be more far reaching. But the reach is gratuitous and drawing the line at the content of calls doesn't meaningfully curb the invasion of privacy.

If I stop pissing in the ocean, I'm not going to prevent rising sea levels.

On this point I can essentially agree. I just find the argument that the data that can be inferred is meaningless to be kind of odd.

To me, 'metadata' is a confusing word for this type of data. People in the ed-tech space have begun calling this type of data 'paradata' [1] because it sits beside the data.

This helps make it distinct from metadata. Metadata then describes the data itself (tags, classifications, etc.), whereas paradata describes the data's lifecycle and use (e.g. who used it where and when how, etc).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradata_%28Learning_Resource_A...

Metadata is not (necessarily) located above data - they are (usually) located next to each other and the metadata augments the data.

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