Quotes from Rick Smolan

Big Data is just that - big. But, it's a term that is largely misunderstood and difficult to explain.

The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments.

Do you realize the FBI filing system from the '50s was much more secure? How could you have stolen that data? It was on notecards. Now someone with a thumb drive, or remotely, can take the equivalent of millions of those notecards.

Those who fear that we are losing our individualism couldn't be more wrong: Americans have never been more free to create and recreate themselves.

They're trying to put data centers in cold environments because they're actually generating so much heat now; they're using up so much electricity.

I wonder if 50 years from now we'll look back, and maybe Julian Assange will be the hero and J. Edgar Hoover will be the enemy of the state.

A tiny apartment might hold three generations of an immigrant family.

Some people think that Facebook is fantastic; other people are very worried about it.

As individuals, we have very little say about how our data is being used. I'm not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that, as an individual, if I'm the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it's going to be used.

There are a number of fascinating stories included in 'The Human Face of Big Data' that represent some of the most innovative applications of data that are shaping our future.

How do you photograph a gadget in a new, and not boring, way? You have to get away from people sitting in front of a computer. You have to get a look at the digital signature.

Insurance companies want to make sure that you stay on your medicine.

Americans are changing right before our eyes. They are choosing different lifestyles, families, traditions and ways of living.

I think we're going to have auxiliary hard drives to offload our memories.

I think people love this idea of leaving a message for the future. I was always fascinated by the idea of time capsules.

The hard thing about the book world is that you never know whether 10 people or a million people will find it interesting.

One of the nice things about living in Silicon Valley is that I end up at all these conferences and things, and I get to listen in on the zeitgeist.

If you ever plan to run for office, if you're a teenager, remember everything you do, every tweet, every Facebook posting, every picture you put on Instagram will be there forever for journalists and politicians - for your competition to dig up.

My company, Against All Odds Productions, has done print on demand; we were the first to do a book with a CD-ROM in the early 1990s. We do custom covers. It's always fun to do something new.

I find Facebook absolutely fascinating because I don't think there's ever been any one source that had so much information about each of us - who we talk to, who our friends are, what books we read, what we're buying, what movies we saw, what our travel is.

In 1978, 'Time' magazine sent me to do a story about children in Southeast Asia fathered by American GIs. What I saw was very upsetting, but the story they published was whitewashed.

The way they heat their homes in Korea is to put bricks under the floors, so the heat actually radiates from underneath the floor.

My father said, 'You should do 'A Day in the Life of Medicine.' A book about how the human race wants to heal itself in new ways.

If you ask anyone on any street corner in the world what the Soviet Union looks like, they would probably have very strong opinions. And they probably would be wrong.