Suppose I give you an n-digit number and ask you what it represents. This seems impossible, and in theory it is impossible. But in practice it’s often possible.
Apps on a phone may automatically interpret a 10-digit number as a phone number or a 16-digit number as a package tracking number. And very often these interpretations are correct, given the kinds of things most people use their phones for.
It’s not surprising that a 10-digit number on a phone is a phone number. It’s more interesting that a 16-digit number is likely a tracking number. It could be other things, such as a credit card number. But people don’t usually write out credit card numbers in a text note; credit card numbers likely saved in some more opaque way.
I run into a variation of this problem routinely, trying to infer what a number represents inside medical notes.
A five-digit number could be a US postal code, or it could be a medical procedure code.
A six-digit number could be a date in MMDDYY format, or it could be a medical record number.
A ten-digit number could be a phone number, or it could be an NPI (National Provider Identifier) number.
It’s interesting that it’s possible make a good guess at what a number means inside unstructured text. Context has been lost, but not all context: you know you’re looking at medical notes. And that meager bit of context can be surprisingly useful.
I have had to mangle hymn tune meters in Web pages, inserting HTML comments so that some browsers do not interpret strings like “10.10.10.10” as phone numbers.
When is the medium NOT the message? When it is vague or indistinct. The data can be perfectly accurate, but lack adequate implicit or explicit labeling.
The label (metadata) is often a property of the medium (context), though all data science folks would prefer it to be super-glued to the data value, no matter the medium.
In some countries, the format of the national social security number happens to match one of the GUID variants exactly, which triggers red flags in certain data protection systems. The workaround is to add a custom rule that suppresses the check when conditions A, B and C are met. Still, a funny coincidence. Also, a good example of how the same string (or number) can mean different things depending on context.