A method (and system) for data acquisition includes extracting information from user communications and allowing a user to control the information to be extracted. The method of data acquisition may include downloading a user's sent materials from a communication data repository, analyzing the downloaded materials and extracting data portions that are authored by the user, generating statistical values from the extracted data, transmitting the generated statistical values to one or multiple repositories, receiving generated statistical values one or multiple server machines, and aggregating statistical values of multiple users.