Between 1984 and Star Trek

Big data may lead to a sinsiter surveillance state. But a bigger problem will be the amount of spam we'll be hit with, says John Stepek.

In the 2002 science-fiction film Minority Report, the main character (played by Tom Cruise) is chased through a shopping precinct. As he runs past advertising billboards, they call to him by name, images shifting to show things he might want to buy. I was at Wired magazine's money conference this month, and an executive from online payments giant PayPal asked if the audience would find this cool' or creepy' in real life. As an evangelist for a firm closely linked to online retail, he thought it was cool' that firms could easily spot you, and sell you goods you might actually want. Much of the audience thought it was creepy'. I didn't think either fitted. The word I had in mind was annoying'.

Yes, there are lots of creepy' aspects to our heavily monitored existence. Look at the fate of US spy agency whistleblower Ed Snowden, seemingly destined for exile in Venezuela. He may turn out to be a cunning double agent. But I suspect he's just an idealistic 30-year-old who hasn't yet quite realised what he gave up to tell the world what we already knew. Equally, lots of cool' benefits can come from sharing data. Our cover story looks at some of the uses for big data and ways to invest in the sector. We also profile the billionaire founder of one of the most useful companies you've probably never heard of map-making specialists Esri.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.