The Human Face of Big Data Those elements culminate the Human Face of Big Data project, a series of initiatives begun earlier this fall to spark global conversations about the effect of humanity’s ability to collect and analyze enormous amounts of data in real time. It launched late September with a free mobile app that gleaned a week’s worth of information from some 300,000 participants on how they lived, viewed their lives, and interacted with others with similar digital footprints. The crowdsourced collection of anonymous data will be made available to researchers, data scientists, and educators to study as a data snapshot of a week in the life of humanity in 2012.