So-called anticipatory systems bring Big Data to a micro-level, providing you with near-term knowledge you couldn’t find on your own in exchange for you handing over all your personal info so that companies can better target you for ads and who knows what else. It’s convenience at a cost. From Antonio Regalado at MIT’s Technology Review:

“Would you trade your personal data for a peek into the future? Andreas Weigend did.

The former chief scientist of Amazon.com, now directing Stanford University’s Social Data Lab, told me a story about awakening at dawn to catch a flight from Shanghai. That’s when an app he’d begun using, Google Now, told him his flight was delayed.

The software scours a person’s Gmail and calendar, as well as databases like maps and flight schedules. It had spotted the glitch in his travel plans and sent the warning that he shouldn’t rush. When Weigend finally boarded, everyone else on the plane had been waiting for hours for a spare part to arrive.

For Weigend, a fast-talking consultant and lecturer on consumer behavior, such episodes demonstrate ‘the power of a society based on 10 times as much data.’ If the last century was marked by the ability to observe the interactions of physical matter—think of technologies like x-ray and radar—this century, he says, is going to be defined by the ability to observe people through the data they share.”