The Change Mariner

Privacy and The Information Explosion

San Jose Mercury News:

Feel overwhelmed by the deluge of information flooding the world today? No wonder. Researchers say that the amount of new words, sounds, pictures and numbers produced and stored on paper, film or computer disks has almost doubled in three years.

The supply of new material saved in a single year, 2002, would fill half a million libraries the size of the Library of Congress -- the world's largest collection of books and papers -- if it were all converted to print, according to a study by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, political scientists at the University of California-Berkeley.

"Our intent was to quantify people's feeling of being overwhelmed by information and to look at trends,'' Lyman said in a telephone interview.
"People had no sense of why this was happening or where the growth was.''
The recent explosion of recorded data, after centuries of steady but much slower growth, can be traced in large part to two factors:

- The computer revolution, which has made it possible to save vast quantities of information in ones and zeroes, the binary alphabet of the digital age.

- The growth of "Big Science'' in astronomy, nuclear physics and biology, such as the Human Genome Project. Experts figure that in recent decades the number of scientific papers published has been doubling every three years.

The information glut may be making it harder to find useful, dependable material in the tidal wave of material bombarding people's senses, Lyman fears. In addition, more sensitive personal data -- medical, financial, even day-to-day activities -- are being captured and stored by the government and private companies.

"The problem is not so much the mass of information as the possible misuse of it,'' Lyman said. "There's no more privacy."