Records showing the full website addresses you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk/what_we_do — are treated as content. But the first part of an address you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk — is treated as metadata.
In isolation, a single metadata record of a phone call, email, or website visit may not reveal much about a person’s private life, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media.
But if accumulated and analyzed over a period of weeks or months, these details would be “extremely personal,” he told The Intercept, because they could reveal a person’s movements, habits, religious beliefs, political views, relationships, and even sexual preferences.
For Zuckerman, who has studied the social and political ramifications of surveillance, the most concerning aspect of large-scale government data collection is that it can be “corrosive towards democracy” — leading to a chilling effect on freedom of expression and communication.
“Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect,’” he said, “where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 13Copyblogger originally shared: These 4 Exercises Are Guaranteed to Make You a Better Writer Your writing is good. You know how to position words to make clear sentences. You can string together sentences into meaningful paragraphs. You can take those sentences and arrange them into a persuasive post. But you've plateaued. Your writing is getting predictable, stale, and forgettable. And you're not sure how to break out of that mold. If that's you, then you need to check out these exercise from MIT designed to help you evaluate your copy. You'll learn things like: - Your sentence length pattern - If you correctly emphasize the important parts in your sentences and paragraphs. - Whether you lean on simple, complex, or compound sentences. Analyzing your writing style will highlight your weaknesses, and give you a plan to make your writing better. So, when you've got a few minutes, perform these exercises: http://writing.mit.edu/wcc/resources/writers/analyzingyourownstyle +Demian Farnworth 
