This MIT Website Tracks Your Digital Footprint Through Gmail

Wow, this is pretty awesome. If I look at mine, you can clearly see links between certain groups of friends / family.

What the ...?

Never ever share your login credentials with a third-party.

This could have been done as local open-source tool. Why is this a web app?

You can do this yourself with tools like Gephi.

> Never ever share your login credentials with a third-party.

It uses Google's OAuth; the site never sees your password

> Why is this a web app?

Because it's for the average user, and people who don't have time or skill to export their data, research graph formats, then write some ETL to get it into that format, then download Gephi to view it. It makes great sense as a webapp.

> You can do this yourself

You're completely missing the point

Works great, perfectly determined which people in my workplace are programmers and which are biologists (by giving them a different color).

Could one subvert the graph building with the following? Construct an email address A1 that will forward emails to you from person B. Likewise, you communicate with B through their B1. After a period of time (or n messages), switch the pass through entity to a different email address A2 and make a rule on the mail server to bounce the emails from B if they try to reach you at A1. Keep using A1 with someone else.

very interesting, analyzed 40k+ emails and I didn't find that much I didn't already know. More surprised about what can be seen with just an oauth token.