chock is said to have taken more than $40,000 worth of flights on donors’ planes since mid-2011. He is already facing an ethics inquiry for allegedly soliciting funds in 2012. Here’s how the Associated Press discovered this additional ethics breach:
The AP tracked Schock’s reliance on the aircraft partly through the congressman’s penchant for uploading pictures and videos of himself to his Instagram account. The AP extracted location data associated with each image then correlated it with flight records showing airport stopovers and expenses later billed for air travel against Schock’s office and campaign records.
The Associated Press didn’t need to analyze the content of the images to learn about Schock’s travels. (Though the images did apparently include selfies at concerts and other events paid for with taxpayer money.) All it needed was the location metadata.
This reporting lends more support to the notion that metadata isn’t personal — as if that idea should even be contested at this point — and shows that governments and businesses aren’t the only ones that can use metadata to learn more about people.
And unlike those other groups, the Associated Press simply used location metadata from an Instagram feed anyone could view and cross-referenced it with information to which the public has a right to access. There was nothing shady about its methods.
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