Data. Everywhere. Loads of it. Stop with the panic guys.

From Bryan Caplan:

The populists of our Golden Age are loud and furious. They’re crying about “monopolies” that deliver firehoses worth of free stuff. They’re bemoaning the “death of competition” in industries (like taxicabs) that governments forcibly monopolized for as long as any living person can remember. They’re insisting that “only the 1% benefit” in an age when half of the high-profile new businesses literally give their services away for free. And they’re lashing out at businesses for “taking our data” – even though five years ago hardly anyone realized that they had data.

Hardly a day passes without some self-appointed guardian of public interest - a media-hungry MP, someone from an anti-competition lobby group, a hand-wringing charity chief executive - telling us that all those nasty tech people are stealing your data. And hinting that, somehow the deal we're getting is a lousy one.

Well it isn't. Most of that data only exists because you chose to co-produce it with one of the tech companies' free sites - because you booked a taxi, used a restaurant app, posted your holiday pictures on Facebook or trolled Twitter for lols. There is data everywhere, piling up in huge mounds and it isn't a problem, it's not stealing your privacy and these companies are not doing anything other than trying to make a bob or two by giving the consumer value (or flogging you some stuff, so to speak).

As Caplan points out about the 'privacy' we claim we want back:

The privacy to not be part of a Big Data Set. The privacy to not have firms try to sell us stuff based on our previous purchases. In short, we have lost the kinds of privacy that no prudent person loses sleep over.

Absolutely.

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