By: Jeff Baer, Senior Associate, and Marc Kraut, IT Manager
From counterterrorism to spying accusations, the use of metadata has been hotly debated by media and on Capitol Hill since Edward Snowden exposed National Security Administration practices in 2013.
What is metadata? It’s simply information about data, such as a document’s author, the date it was created and the file size. As you may know, Snowden made public that the NSA has been collecting metadata on U.S. phone calls, including the numbers being called and the length of the calls, but not the actual conversations.
Now, we don’t intend to debate this one particular use of metadata. We’ll leave that to Congress. However, our team has begun investigating how we can use metadata to put fraudsters behind bars.
For example, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of documents are filed for each automobile insurance claim – medical files, details on damages and injuries sustained in the accident, and other pertinent information. How can we use metadata to separate the legitimate from the fraudulent?
One way is to analyze who originated the document. Using metadata, we can determine whether a form was actually created by whom the claimant says it was. We also can see when the document was created. Perhaps metadata will show it was first generated BEFORE the accident even occurred and then updated following the crash. This knowledge could be used as key evidence in proving a claim is fraudulent.
With more than three billion people using the internet each day across the globe, it is important attorneys understand technologies available to shape their cases. Metadata is just one of many ways our legal and IT teams are working together to fight fraud.
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