Why drowning in data means an end to privacy

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 28, 2006

We’re up to our necks in data, maybe to our ears—or beyond. IDC’s Susan Feldman cites a study showing that office workers spend an average of 14.5 hours per week just wading through e-mail, and another 9.5 hours searching for information on the Internet. And this is a productivity tool?

Here’s what’s going to happen. Companies are going to find more and more ways to automate many of these tasks we do. This is already a work in progress. If the 20th century automated industrial work, the 21st century will do the same for knowledge workers. We will increasingly share our work with automatic systems which will record and analyze our every click and key stroke. We cannot handle the data without this automation. But the automation itself produces more data—about us.

And what will those data be used for? To squeeze every ounce of productivity out of knowledge workers.