Data the New Gold in Mining

The latest term that's hit the electron highway is Data Mining. This is not some method of retrieving a rare material that will save the world from climate change, it's information that's a click away.

The eyes being the window to your soul. Now, your finger opens the door to your personal life. With every click of the mouse you are telling the world everything about you. Anyone can find almost everything, your personality, level of income, religion, political affiliation, health care needs and every tawdry tidbit of dirty laundry you try to hide in the basket of your mind.

Market research has been used since the invention of the wheel. Knowing what your audience wants before they want it is now the pursuit of mathematicians using algorithms with super computers that makes data out of data to predict the next trend.

As you surf your Face Book page the amount of data you produce fills columns of useful information, not just clicks on clever phrases or products but how long your curser hovered over it, is data. How fast you scroll through a page can show your interest in a product but also your education level.

The amount of data available is generated by what we do and by what we don't do.

Seeing the power of data is to simply open your eyes. It's everywhere and in everything, as if the matrix is alive and well and we’re in it.

With the blessing of the Obama administration the NSA has been fishing for data to analyze, of course all under the guise of national security. By understanding you don't need to know the content of a conversation to know what's being said.

You just need to know the conversation took place in order to paint a picture of whats trending.

As we interact with all of our technology, our activity's create patterns in the streams of data that the government is collecting. That data is compared with known patterns of activity's by terrorist in order to locate possible breeches in future security.

The question has become what activity's does the Obama Administration now consider security issues?

People are predictable even when erratic. This predictability equates into probability’s that provide the knowledge to which evil men can rule over others.

Market research or data mining is spying, it's all a matter of how it's done and for what purpose will determine whether it's legal.

Something for my audience to ponder.....When calculating an enemy's troop strength you don't need to photograph the troops to know how many are there. You just need to know how many latrines where dug.