Social media makes big data collection dangerously easy. By the end of this year, there’ll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites. There are 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every single minute. There are 200 million Tweets posted every day. The average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month. Back in the year 2000, about 100 billion photos were shot worldwide, but only a minuscule proportion of them were actually uploaded online. In 2010, only on Facebook, in a single month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded. The internet and its content expands at a shocking rate, creating an almost unlimited data base. The more we share, the more data we produce. Consequently, the more data we produce, the more scientist study and understand us.
