Information Explosion

In this book , I examine the tremendous growth in information being collected on individuals. From the examples provided in this chapter, it is clear that many details in the lives of most people are being documented in databases somewhere. I provide examples that exemplify recent behavioral tendencies in the collection of person-specific data. These tendencies are: (1) given an existing personspecific data collection, expand the number of fields being collected; I term this the "collect more" trend; (2) replace an existing aggregate data collection with a person-specific one; I term this the "collect specifically" trend; and, (3) given a question or problem to solve or merely provided the opportunity, gather information by starting a new person-specific data collection related to the question, problem or opportunity; I term this the "collect it if you can" trend. No matter how you look at it, all three tendencies result in more and more information being collected on individuals.