Computers have been collecting data since the 1940’s.  In the last 20 years digital storage technology and processing capacity far exceed utilization.

Corporations, organizations and individuals have probably massed more data about individuals than the individual would be able to review about themselves in a lifetime.

It is probably just physically impossible, there is so much.  There is no metric on this I am aware of but even if not completely true it is intended to be illustrative of the volume of digital data.

We used to have warehouses full of stored documents, whole buildings rented to keep records stored.  This physical storage capacity limited how many and how long records could be kept.

That limitation is no longer an issue.

Mining the Data

Having large amounts of data available is not, in and of itself, necessarily of great value.  Without the ability to collate and analyze the data within reasonable durations, it is not usefull.

This also is a problem computing power has solved.  We can now develop software programs to sort, group, interpret and finally summarize the answers to our questions about the data, in relatively short order.

The computing software and hardware are great tools for enabling us to use the data effectively but human intelligence is still needed to know what questions to ask  (at least for now) and to action the results.

Our decisions, things like whether to buy, spend, create new products, services (and so on) are greatly improved by our incredible  data storage and processing capabilities.