"We have seen a fair amount of Steam account data floating around on the black market.
I think 5percentt of the data floating around the world is valuable, and the rest is junk".
With so much personal data floating out among political campaigns, consultants, and hundreds of unaccountable private companies, how could someone not be abusing Facebook users?
Yet many firms will not let company data float around in a public cloud where they could end up in the wrong hands.
There is an increasing awareness of just how much can be learned or predicted about an individual from myriad data floating around the web.
"It was annoying," the chief executive of Weather.com, Deborah Wilson, said, " I can't say that it undermined our sales efforts, but to have obviously bad data floating around was a nuisance".
First, it makes the invisible visible: it takes the data floating like jellyfish through the milieu and connects them to concrete places and times, making it easy to visualize trends and clusters out of previously abstract information.
The researchers, who reported their findings in the journal Science, found that there was now 295 exabytes of data floating around the world – that's 29,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces of information.
"You can substitute any content you want -- for instance, geographic information or satellite data -- and then while you are sitting around a conference table looking at a 3-D image of the data floating above a map, you can also talk to one another and discuss the implications of the image".
