Rick Smolan

I think we're going to have auxiliary hard drives to offload our memories.

I think people love this idea of leaving a message for the future. I was always fascinated by the idea of time capsules.

If you ever plan to run for office, if you're a teenager, remember everything you do, every tweet, every Facebook posting, every picture you put on Instagram will be there forever for journalists and politicians - for your competition to dig up.

I wonder if 50 years from now we'll look back, and maybe Julian Assange will be the hero and J. Edgar Hoover will be the enemy of the state.

Data exhaust' is probably my least favorite phrase in the big data world 'cause it sounds like something you're trying to get rid of or something noxious that comes out of the back of your car.

What amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room, and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person's perspective rather than the situation itself.

My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings.

Targeted ads, I think, are useful because I don't want to see all the crap. I'm not interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, but I am interested in buying a new MacBook Air. So if organizations like Facebook can actually make the ads more relevant to me, if they know what I am interested in, I have no problem with that.

As individuals, we have very little say about how our data is being used. I'm not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that, as an individual, if I'm the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it's going to be used.

Photographers have always been each other's biggest fans.

Big Data is just that - big. But, it's a term that is largely misunderstood and difficult to explain.

I love the physicality of books.