'There is No Such Thing as Data'

What we have are innumerable different collections of information, each of them specific to a particular application. Technology analyst Benedict Evans writes: Technology is full of narratives, but one of the loudest and most persistent concerns artificial intelligence and something called "data." AI is the future, we are told, and it's all about data -- and data is the future, and we should own it and maybe be paid for it. And countries need data strategies and data sovereignty, too. Data is the new oil. This is mostly nonsense. There is no such thing as "data," it isn't worth anything, and it doesn't belong to you anyway. Most obviously, data is not one thing, but innumerable different collections of information, each of them specific to a particular application, that can't be used for anything else. For instance, Siemens has wind turbine telemetry and Transport for London has ticket swipes, and those aren't interchangeable. You can't use the turbine telemetry to plan a new bus route, and if you gave both sets of data to Google or Tencent, that wouldn't help them build a better image recognition system. This might seem trivial put so bluntly, but it points to the uselessness of very common assertions on the lines of "China has more data" -- more of what data? Meituan delivers 50mn restaurant orders a day, and that lets it build a more efficient routing algorithm, but you can't use that for a missile guidance system. You can't even use it to build restaurant delivery in London. "Data" does not exist -- there are merely many sets of data. Of course, when people talk about data they mostly mean "your" data -- your information and the things that you do on the internet, some of which is sifted, aggregated and deployed by technology companies. We want more privacy controls, but we also think we should have ownership of that data, wherever it is. The trouble is, most of the meaning in "your" data is not in you but in all of the interactions with other people. What you post on Instagram means very little: the signal is in who liked your posts and what else they liked, in what you liked and who else liked it, and in who follows you, who else they follow and who follows them, and so on outwards in a mesh of interactions between millions of people.

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