MIT’s new app, Immersion, uses your Gmail metadata to draw a digital footprint of your email-centric life. It also shows how small apps are well poised to commercialize metadata, especially by its backers posing as research institutions instead of as commercial organizations. In the post-Snowden era, such apps comprise a vast jurisdiction where the use of metadata is still unregulated, and is especially well-poised to stall consumer-level technology. Here’s my OpEd on this for The Hindu.