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Stanford University researchers have launched a study to figure out how the NSA's metadata collection affects the Americans whose information is being looked through, the Voice of Russia said.

The information about the NSA espionage was first announced by the former NSA agent Edward Snowden. After the huge scandal the US President Obama held a meeting with Charlie Rose of PBS in order to set a strategy that will help to defend the American government policy.

Back in June, President Obama has stated: “Program number one is called the 2015 program. What that does is it gets data from the service providers – like a Verizon – in bulk. And basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names, there's no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place. So that database is sitting there.”

However, this information doesn’t match the data collected by Stanford researchers Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler. They claim the agency does not need to collect names to identify an individual.

The experts have developed an app, known as MetaPhone, which people can sign for and give the permission for the analysts to access their metadata.

Later on Mayer and Muchler wrote, “We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from our crowdsourced MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those three sources – all free and public – we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684 (13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook.”

“What about if an organization were willing to put in some manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three initial sources, we were up to 73.”

The researched stated that even the financial limitations couldn’t prevent the access of the information. They still managed to do that. The NSA on the contrary has no hardship with that, with their annual budget in millions of dollars.

“How about if money were no object? We don't have the budget or credentials to access a premium data aggregators, so we ran our 100 numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74 matched. Between Intelius, Google search, and our three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100 numbers,” researchers continue.

The current analysis is not the first one that was organized. Earlier, various other colleges and universities have made certain tests to distinguish how the information is collected and with what methods. For instance, during those tests it was proved that one can identify person’s sexual orientation according to his “likes” on Facebook.