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Government surveillance programs point up new data-mining concerns. But the NSA monitoring programs focus on collecting "meta" data—not the actual procedures you've undergone, but merely the records of things you searched for online, or people you telephoned. What can this metadata reveal? Plenty about your health, experts argue; simply knowing who you're calling can be just as revealing as what you say. If you can track a series of calls, one privacy expert tells tells the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, "you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

David Vladeck began an inquiry into data brokers' practices, concerned that algorithms that mined for data patterns could create unfair stereotypes. (Vladeck recently stepped down.) For example, "whether someone would be classified as a health risk just because they bought products linked to an increased chance of heart attack," the Associated Press reports.

So far, many companies have tried to dispel such fears by noting that the data they gather, store and analyze remains "anonymous." But that, as it turns out, is not entirely accurate, in that it sells the power of data analysis radically short. Take the analysis of anonymous movement profiles, for example. According to a current study by the online journal Scientific Reports, our mobility patterns are so different that that they can be used to "uniquely identify 95 percent of the individuals." The more data is in circulation and available for analysis, the more likely it is that anonymity becomes "algorithmically impossible," says Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan. In his blog, Narayanan writes that only 33 bits of information are sufficient to identify a person.

A study by New York advertising agency Ogilvy One concludes that 75 percent of respondents don't want companies to store their personal data, while almost 90 percent were opposed to companies tracking their surfing behavior on the Internet.

Is it truly desirable for cultural assets like TV series or music albums to be tailored to our predicted tastes by means of data-driven analyses? What happens to creativity, intuition and the element of surprise in this totally calculated world?

There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems — here’s an app that can fix drug addiction! promote fiscal responsibility! advance childhood literacy!

The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared. Last semester, 39 percent of the students in the class were women, and 73 percent had never coded before.

I protested: “What about Facebook?” He looked at me, and I thought about it. No doubt, Facebook has changed the world. Facebook has made it easier to communicate, participate, pontificate, track down new contacts and vet romantic prospects. But in other moments, it has also made me nauseatingly jealous of my friends, even as I’m aware of its unreality. Everything on Facebook, like an Instagram photo, is experienced through a soft-glow filter. And for all the noise, the pinging notifications and flashing lights, you never really feel productive on Facebook.

Two professors, computer scientist George Mohler and anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham, who specializes in crime scenarios, were instrumental in developing the predictive method of fighting crime. Their program is based on models for predicting the aftershocks of earthquakes.

The two data experts, Mohler and Brantingham, have since started a company and are marketing their product, Predictive Policing, worldwide

"Security is one of the biggest growth areas for Big Data applications," says Schröder. In addition to crime and terrorism, Splunk focuses on the growing number of attacks in, and by means of, the Internet and its software can detect hacker attacks or other cyber attacks. "We are positioning ourselves for an expanding cyber war," Schröder says. But the data hunters' new war also has many civilian aspects.

The self-confident founders of Kreditech lend money through the Internet: short-term mini-loans of up to €500, with the average customer receiving €109. Instead of requiring credit information from their customers, they determine the probability of default on their own, using a social scoring method that consists of high-speed data analysis. "Ideally, the money should be in customers' accounts within 15 minutes of approval.

Kreditech also requires access to Facebook profiles, so that it can verify whether a user's photo and location match information on other social networking sites, like Xing and LinkedIn -- and whether his or her friends include many with similar education levels or many colleagues working in the same company.

All of this increases the likelihood that Kreditech is dealing with a real person.

Therein lies the tension that makes wikiHow so spellbinding. It's a bare-bones SEO play, living and dying on the search queries of frustrated homemakers and maladjusted teens, but it's also, for better and often for worse, one of the web's foremost resources for the frustrated, annoyed, sad, or depressed. It lacks the scruples to compensate the army of contributors without whom its for-profit business model would quickly crumble, but thanks to the infinite idealism of those volunteer editors and a bounty of articles on navigating the terrors of adolescent social life, it is a place of startling warmth. It's one of those magical places where the collision between the web's structuring algorithms and its users' idiosyncratic humanity is on full display.