"Why wasn't I informed?"

In his great post "Why wasn't I informed?" Seth Godin starts with a distinction between innocent ignorance and darn thoughtlessness (my terminology in both cases).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/visionshare/

He concludes with "The rules are now clear: no one is going to inform you, but it's easier than ever to inform yourself. Before you spend the money, the time or the attention of your friends, look it up."

We could argue that it's not that easy. We are swamped with too much information.

(Organizations have many a tools to alleviate this issue. Also a new term: Big Data, to help market these tools.)

© Copyright Rodney Burton 

In any case, it still is your responsibility to do your best to be informed before taking action, so if you do want to make information useful, you need to stand up, look around, see what's going on.
If it still is worth a shot - set course and dive back in - do the actual work.

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All this is fine (and trendy, motivating etc.), but there are times when we DO want the information to find us. When we are in some sort of danger, disadvantage, or distress. When our privacy is threatened, our perspective compromised.

We want that whoever holds the relevant piece of the puzzle will have a sense of morality/responsibility to use it for our benefit.
Hoarding every aspect of every thing we do must come with some sort of liability.
Cheating Coaxing people into buying more is a nice excuse, but the right to take advantage of tracking and analytics should be earned.

Right now,  (virtually) nothing stands in the way a big data aggregator from becoming a self serving ministry of truth.