Everything in our lives is fast becoming digital data. This not only applies to your internet activity but also to things such as your face being decoded digitally so that it can be uniquely identified by surveillance cameras even when you are in a crowd.
In August of 2011, Marc Andreessen (founder of among the first widely used web browsers - Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, and currently co-founder and general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal titled “Why Software Is Eating The World.” In it he explains a trend he was observing at the time and how the infrastructure and technology necessary to disrupt and innovate within industries using software is now in place and allows such solutions to be implemented at a global scale.
In short, it means that a lot of our world and the world around us is now readable by software, allowing the software to provide insights, analytics, and more. However, with many things becoming readable to software comes the potential downside, big data is watching you and everything you do.
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