Intelligence services collect metadata on the communication of all citizens. Politicians would have us believe that this data doesn’t say all that much. A reader of De Correspondent put this to the test and demonstrated otherwise: metadata reveals a lot more about your life than you think.

The analysts could see that some users had the same password as Ton, and their password hints were known to be ‘punk metal’, ‘astrolux’ and ‘another day in paradise’. ‘This quickly led us to Ton Siedsma’s favourite band, Strung Out, and the password “strungout”,’ the analysts write. With this password, they were able to access Ton’s Twitter, Google and Amazon accounts.

What they and I have done for this article is child’s play compared with what intelligence agencies could do. An intelligence agency has metadata on many more people over a much longer period of time, with much more advanced analysis tools at its disposal.

So the next time you hear a minister, security expert or information officer say ‘Oh, but that’s only metadata,’ think of Ton Siedsma — the guy you now know so much about because he shared just a week of metadata with us.