Attempts to keep online data private a futile endeavour

Our relatively recent and rapid transformation into a data-driven, data-devouring society comes as no big surprise to Jeffrey Ullman, a pioneering figure in the field of data science. "There's a sense in which all of this was inevitable from the time that Gordon Moore described Moore's Law," says Ullman, emeritus Stanford W Ascherman Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University in California, whose students have included Google founder Sergey Brin. "Throughout my career, key parameters have been doubling every two years, which led to unimaginably large capabilities. When I started out, my first computer had, I think, 8,000 bytes of memory. Today Facebook has close to a petabyte of main memory." He pauses, then concedes: "It's kind of unimaginable."