The excerpts seems point to a problem of loss of (or failure to use) critical thinking skills, and not so much the evil of collecting and organizing information. That's a problem regardless of whether extensive databases exist or not.

I think the article gets into the more relevant problems of pooling of sensitive information such that it becomes very vulnerable to misuse.

Maybe most impressive is the recognition that more powerful computers leads to more sophisticated analysis, which leads to gathering more data, which leads to needing more powerful computers.