Wondering what exactly the metadata Google hands over to the NSA every day is comprised of? Here you go. Created by the MIT Media Lab, Immersion collects all data from your account regarding to and from whom emails were sent, then creates an interactive infographic mapping out all of your connections. That’s the graph for my year-old ANIMAL email account above; Bucky is the big blue dot, Marina is the smaller orange one.
As you can see, you can paint a pretty vivid picture of someone without even looking into the contents of their emails. Brian Fung at the Atlantic, whose email account is much older than mine, was able to map the kinds of associates in his life–family, college friends, friends from D.C.–based on the colors assigned to them by Immersion.
And yes, creating an infographic does require you to give up your information to MIT, but wisely, the app gives you the option to wipe the data from its servers when you’re done.
