What if "big data" just…isn't worth very much?

I'm not saying the emperor has no clothes. I am saying his clothes are cheap, tacky, don't work and are seriously overrated.

“Data is the new oil” has been a tech catchphrase for so long that we tend to forget who it was who actually said the words. It wasn’t an American tech billionaire, it turns out, but British entrepreneur Clive Humby – the man who invented the Tesco Clubcard.

His comment, which might have seemed bold in 2006, strikes us today as just obviously true. The six biggest public companies in the world are all tech giants, and all but one seems to owe much of its value to data.¹ Alphabet and Meta take the vast majority of their revenue from targeted advertising. Apple, Microsoft and Amazon also take billions in ad revenue, but the latter two also provide much of the infrastructure upon which the data economy relies.

The world’s biggest companies got their dominant position through data. We’ve also spent most of the last two decades hearing about the dangers of all of this data – micro-targeting is undermining the foundations of our democracy, data monopolies mean it is impossible to compete with …