In his latest musing for the Washington Post, Vivek Wadhwa, a leading thinker the on future of technology and innovation, argues that the rise of big data brings tremendous possibilities and frightening perils.

Big Data is accumulating at an exponentially increasing rate: the NSA has been mining our phone metadata and occasionally listening in; marketers are using this to sell more to us; and politicians are fine-tuning their campaigns.

But Vivek believes that this is minor compared to what lies ahead, noting that in the not-so-distant-future we “will be able to analyse all data we have collected from the beginning of time—as if we were entering a data time machine.” He goes on to say that “if information is power and power corrupts, we’ll need to be careful about making sure the potential of big data isn’t misused.”

Click here to read the full article.