Editing Information explosion (section)

==Growth patterns==
* The world's technological capacity to store information grew from, optimally compressed, 2.6 exabytes in 1986 to 15.7 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 exabytes in 2007. <ref name="HilbertLopez2011">[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1200970 "The Womartinhilbert.net/WorldInfoCapacity.html "free access to the study"] and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIKPjOuwqHo "video animation"].</ref>
* The world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way [[broadcast]] networks was 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986, 715 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1993, 1,200 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000, and 1,900 in 2007.<ref name="HilbertLopez2011"/>
* The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way [[telecommunications network]]s was 0.281 exabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986, 0.471 in 1993, 2.2 in 2000, and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007.<ref name="HilbertLopez2011"/>

A new metric that is being used in an attempt to characterize the growth in person-specific information, is the disk storage per person (DSP), which is measured in megabytes/person (where [[megabytes]] is 10<sup>6</sup> [[bytes]] and is abbreviated MB). Global DSP (GDSP) is the total rigid disk drive space (in MB) of new units sold in a year divided by the [[world population]] in that year. The GDSP metric is a crude measure of how much disk storage could possibly be used to collect person-specific data on the world population.<ref name="Sweeney, Latanya 2001"/> 
In 1983, one million fixed drives with an estimated total of 90 [[terabytes]] were sold worldwide; 30MB drives had the largest market segment.<ref>Disk/Trend report 1983,” Computer Week. Mountain View, CA. (46) 11/11/83.</ref> In 1996, 105 million drives, totaling 160,623 terabytes were sold with 1 and 2 [[gigabyte]] drives leading the industry.<ref>Rigid disk drive sales to top $34 billion in 1997,” Disk/Trend News. Mountain View, CA: Disk/Trend, Inc., 1997.</ref> By the year 2000, with 20GB drive leading the industry, rigid drives sold for the year are projected to total 2,829,288 terabytes Rigid disk drive sales to top $34 billion in 1997.

According to [[Latanya Sweeney]], there are three trends in data gathering today:

'''Type 1.''' Expansion of the number of fields being collected, known as the “collect more” trend.

'''Type 2.''' Replace an existing aggregate data collection with a person-specific one, known as the “collect specifically” trend.

'''Type 3.''' Gather information by starting a new person-specific data collection, known as the “collect it if you can” trend.<ref name="Sweeney, Latanya 2001"/>