Big brother is watching you

In a project of Owellian proportions Microsoft is developing ways of capturing the data generated by an entire life.

Story: How MS will know ALL about you – ZDNet

capturing the average person’s life would require about one terabyte (that’s a trillion bytes) of disk space. Over an active lifespan of 67 years, that estimate breaks down as:

100 e-mail messages per day;

100 Web pages viewed per day;

5 scanned pages per day;

1 book every 10 days;

10 photos per day;

10 hours of sound per day; and

1 CD per week.

While one terabyte seems incredible today, Bell estimates that the average PC will have that much storage space by 2010, and probably before then.

Quite apart from the paranoia that allowing microsoft access to such data, this makes me realise that the information processors we carry around are prety amazing really being able to handle all this and more.