It doesn't require processing all data though, just enough of it. Consider something simple like identification. How do you automatically identify someone from

It doesn't require processing all data though, just enough of it. Consider something simple like identification. How do you automatically identify someone from video? Face recognition is the go to method now, and it will be used in the future as well, but it will be more capable, of course. But that's only one out of many techniques that are possible, especially with massive amounts of computing power and storage available. Once you've identified someone once in video you can match up other data, such as kinematics and biometrics. How tall you are, how much you weigh, what your overall shape is, your hair color and style, etc. Your typical routines and hangout places. Where you buy coffee, where you watch movies, where you shop. Also, the way you hold yourself, how you walk and stand. Your friends can recognize you without seeing your face, often using these sorts of clues, but there's no reason computers can't use the same techniques. Meanwhile, with enough data computers can catalog your wardrobe. With that sort of information available, and it's really not an enormous amount of data per person, it'll be possible to automatically identify people even without their faces visible, even if they're wearing new clothes and have recently changed their hair styles, and then that info will be cataloged. And again, that's just square one. It'll be almost trivial to keep track of where everyone is, what they are doing, and with whom on a time scale of at least every day. Then there are the scary things. Videos of crowds at protests and rallies can and will be automatically indexed to identify every single participant, even if they're covering their faces. And that's the least imaginative thing that will be possible with such a torrent of data and analysis.