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What is the REAL value of your precious, precious data?

Why your personal information isn't as important as you think

Take it. It's useless to me

Finally, we've got the idea of the value of each piece of information and the value of the aggregate pile of all that information. One single piece of information, one data point, is worth – perhaps – nothing at all. It's the agglomeration of millions or billions of such data points into an information flow that enables us to try and assign a value to what we can find out from it. And it's this last that really has the value and is what we can rightly call Big Data.

At which point, of course, we find ourselves in something of a bind. For if it's the process and the accumulation that is adding the value, then what value can we assign to each individual part of that flow? It's a bit like assigning value to a rivet on a bridge. Sure, the bridge is valuable, the accumulated effect of all the rivets is what gives the bridge its value. But what would we pay to ensure that one specific (or any single) rivet were there and working? Probably nothing, given that there's redundancy in such things.

This is, I think, where author Jaron Lanier's ideas from two years back about people being paid for their information falls down. So, too, where certain Eurocrats fail in their insistence that European data is valuable.

We have a number of different possible estimations of value here. What do you have to pay someone to give the information? Not a lot, as it turns out: provide a webpage and people will tell you all sorts of things. So the information, data, in the hands of the originator seems to have a value not far above zero, if it is above zero.

Yet at the other end of the system there's people making billions by manipulating the accumulated and aggregated data. So this obviously does all have some value. But it seems to be the process of collecting, accumulating, aggregating and then parsing this data flow – that is the part of the process that is adding the value.

Thus, logically, the value of doing all of that should be going to the people who are doing it. And the more Marxist we are, the more we should think this, perhaps. The value is being created by the data engineers, not by the originators. The value should, as with all other work by hand or brain, accrue to the data engineers.

Another way to reach the same point is that in a market, things are worth whatever anyone is willing to pay for them, whatever someone is willing to try and charge for them. As no-one buys the data itself, no-one successfully sells it on an individual basis, so the data itself has no individual value at all.

It is the data stream that has value. While we can express that as a value assigned to each contributor to the stream, that's really not the way to look at it. It would be like a surfer trying to assign a value to each water molecule involved in the crestion of a wave. It's the system itself that is the value, not the components of it, so the value must be assigned to the system, not the components.

There’s absolutely no doubt at all that there is value in Big Data. It's just that the value seems to be in the “Big” part and thus there's little to no value that can be assigned to the individual data points. ®

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