We live in the information age, an era that began with the advent of personal computers and continued with the creation and use widespread use of the Internet and many other forms of digital technology. The storage of data on digital media has only accelerated during this period and is expected to continue to grow for the foreseeable future. This data comes in hundreds of different forms and whether it's credit card history, weather conditions, surveillance footage or cell phone records, it can now all be collected and stored almost indefinitely. These massive databases are managed and controlled by various entities, including businesses, governments, and organizations. These collections of data are now called big data. Large-scale computer analysis of these databases using complex algorithms allows their owners to draw conclusions and find relationships they might not have even looked for. This raises a host of legal and ethical questions regarding how these findings and relationships are used and how they affect the individuals whose information was used to find them. Tom Price describes many different examples in his article Big Data and Privacy and differentiates some cases. In purely scientific cases, for example the search for the Higgs-Boson particle at CERN, these questions do not arise because the data are entirely technical measurements and do not affect individuals. At the other end of the spectrum are cases such as the NSA's widespread collection of cellular data and other information to combat terrorism or Facebook's covert compilation of user and non-user data from sources outside their own social network. Both instances are highly controlled... middle of paper ... then transmitted to a database. In this database, the information could be compared to other medical history and if there was any sign of a possible medical problem about to occur, such as a heart attack or seizure, the user would be informed. informed. Even though the benefits of this type of data analysis are obvious, many people still worry about how long the data remains stored. As processing power continues to increase, there may soon be no need to store data. Instead, information from all of these new sensors could be collected and analyzed simultaneously, allowing trends and relationships to be identified in real time. This would avoid the disadvantages of permanently storing personal data and also increase the benefits, because now when a trend or relationship is discovered, a user can act immediately to take advantage of it..