There’s an interesting report available for download from the Aspen Institute, titled The Promise and Peril of Big Data, summarizing a workshop the Institute held in 2009. This can be found at
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/promise-peril-big-data

This report explores some of the same issues discussed in Microsoft’s recent book The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, which can be found at

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/

but at a less technical level, and also looks more broadly at implications beyond the sciences.