Future of IT will bring privacy challenges

These days with social networking, photo uploading, blogs, and twittering, can you imagine what someone with some smarts in IT can gather?

The photos are stamped with time and location.  The locations can be mashed with Google Earth and matched to find exact locations.

If someone could collect the information from around the net – from all the sources listed above – to create a coherent report.. one could know exactly who all and how many people walked through, say, Grand Central on a certain day.  Yes, some extrapolation would be required but with enough IT power and info sucking ability for certain parameters anyone – Government or Terrorists – could extract some extremely vital information from – what is considered very harmless information.

The future of IT and internet is probably NOT in creating more information but in collecting what is being created everyday and make sense out of it!  Services like Technorati and Google are doing well and will do well in future.

Also, the future will bring a lot more privacy challenges that we can imagine!  What is your view?