Rick Smolan

“Insurance companies want to make sure that you stay on your medicine.”

“How do you photograph a gadget in a new, and not boring, way? You have to get away from people sitting in front of a computer. You have to get a look at the digital signature.”

“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.”

“A tiny apartment might hold three generations of an immigrant family.”

“If we were to reengineer the DVR, we would cut America's energy bill by 5%.”

“I love the physicality of books.”

“Netflix and Amazon know when you stop and start a program, whether you wanted the whole thing, all of that.”

“Programmers have been wandering out and shooting a shotgun into the night sky and hoping they hit something, and I end up paying $150 for channels full of nothing I want to watch.”

“Do you realize the FBI filing system from the '50s was much more secure? How could you have stolen that data? It was on notecards. Now someone with a thumb drive, or remotely, can take the equivalent of millions of those notecards.”

“I find Facebook absolutely fascinating because I don't think there's ever been any one source that had so much information about each of us - who we talk to, who our friends are, what books we read, what we're buying, what movies we saw, what our travel is.”

“Photographers have always been each other's biggest fans.”

“In 1978, 'Time' magazine sent me to do a story about children in Southeast Asia fathered by American GIs. What I saw was very upsetting, but the story they published was whitewashed.”

“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.”

“They're trying to put data centers in cold environments because they're actually generating so much heat now; they're using up so much electricity.”

“I'm not a computer person at all. I only know how to turn them on. I'm not a programmer. I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag.”

“I'm not very good at science or math, even though I pretend. And I'm not very good at teaching. I'm not very patient.”

“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.”

“The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments.”

“The goal of 'Data Detectives' is to spark the imagination of students around the globe by making them think about new technologies that will impact humanity in ways similar to language and art.”

“You can't talk about big data without talking about things like privacy and ownership.”