The US' National Security Agency can easily use the vast collection of phone records to find out individual names, researchers have revealed.
Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and co-author found that they were easily able to match the phone records or meta-data to individual names with little more than a Google search.
According to Tech Crunch, the American spy agency has claimed that its officers are only collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, safely omitting their actual names from analysis, but the researchers have said that it is difficult to believe the NSA would have any trouble identifying the numbers.
The researcher explained that using a crowdsourced public database of voluntarily submitted phone records, they queried the Yelp, Google Places and Facebook directories, and were able to match 27.1 percent of the 5,000 sample numbers.
They further sampled 100 numbers from their data set to conservatively approximate human analysis, and ran Google searches on each.
The researchers revealed that in under an hour, they were able to associate an individual or a business with 60 of the 100 numbers and when they added in their three initial sources, they were up to 73.
The report said that the science of identifying people from supposedly anonymous databases has become a game for academics, like identifying individuals from DNA database of relatives or even monitor Facebook Likes to estimate a user's sexual preference.
