Testing the Waterhouse

In light of the recent (well I say recent, I mean just over a month) news about Edward Snowden whistleblowing on the NSA and the Prism programme which detailed how the NSA were afforded direct access to data held by companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple, I thought it would be interesting to discuss how data in general can be used (legally) in helping define a test approach. Obviously the Snowden whistleblowing is about a lot more than just data like I'm going to be discussing here, it's about being private online, in my eyes Snowden has done a very brave and very good thing for his country and for the internet community. What happens next with regards to the American public and their willingness to challenge the government will determine if it was worth it or not. (You can read a timeline of events on Snowden here ). However, in relation to testing, a big pool of data with regards to your application/website will come from analytics, be it WebTrends or Google Analyti...