AP CSP Day 45: Metadata | Cycle 2
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Metadata aggregation creates privacy risks more serious than any single metadata field in isolation: combining call duration logs, cell tower location data, and contact frequency can reveal a person's home address, workplace, health conditions, and social network without accessing any call content. This is the aggregation problem applied to metadata. AP CSP Cycle 2 metadata questions present scenarios where multiple metadata fields are combined and ask students to evaluate the severity of the resulting privacy risk or identify which combination of fields is sufficient to reconstruct sensitive information.
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Metadata Aggregation: Privacy at Scale
The Aggregation Problem Revisited
Individual metadata fields are often legally unprotected because each alone reveals little. But combining call logs, location history, purchase records, and web browsing history creates a comprehensive profile of a person's beliefs, relationships, health, and finances.
Scale Changes Everything
A person reviewing your mail one letter at a time would take years to profile you. An algorithm processing millions of metadata records per second can construct a detailed profile in minutes. The privacy risk is not the individual data point but the computational ability to aggregate at scale.
Practice Question
A library digitizes its book collection and stores metadata including title, author, publication year, page count, and file size for each book. A researcher wants to find all books by a specific author published after 2010. Which combination of metadata fields is sufficient to complete this search?
The search has two criteria: specific author AND publication year after 2010. Only the author field (to match the author name) and publication year field (to filter for years > 2010) are needed. No other fields are relevant to this particular query.
B) Title and page count provide no information about who wrote the book or when. C) File size describes the digital file, not the authorship. D) Using all five fields is unnecessary — only the two relevant fields are needed for this specific search.
Students select more fields than necessary, thinking that using more metadata is always better. Effective searches use exactly the fields that match the query criteria.
Match each search criterion to the specific metadata field that addresses it. You only need the fields that directly correspond to what you are searching for.
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