The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, it’s data.
It’s a catchy phrase alright but it’s nowhere near true.
Facebook, for example, might sell some data – anonymised and all that – but it’s a trivial portion of revenues. What Facebook actually sells is the ability to advertise to people. Thus all that revenue is part of the advertising industry, not the data one. Same with Google. And so on – to the point that the value of data is some rounding error when compared to the oil industry.
It’s one of these things that everyone knows, that data is the new oil, which is also a collective delusion.