Got privacy? If you use Twitter or a smartphone, maybe not so much

The notion of online privacy has been greatly diminished in recent years, and just this week two new studies confirm what to many minds is already a dismal picture.

First, a study reported on Monday by Stanford University found that smartphone metadata — information about calls and text messages, such as time and length — can reveal a surprising amount of personal detail.

To investigate their topic, the researchers built an Android app and used it to retrieve the metadata about previous calls and text messages — the numbers, times, and lengths of communications — from more than 800 volunteers’ smartphone logs. In total, participants provided records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts.

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