Short Cuts
For that matter, to say that a Guardian reader consents to all the ways the Guardian uses their data (which they deposit every time they visit the website) is to misunderstand the essentially malleable nature of data itself. Its potential value and use emerges after one has collected it, not before. … It’s sometimes said that data is the ‘oil’ of the digital economy, the resource that fuels everything else. A more helpful analogy is between oil and privacy, a concealed natural resource that is progressively plundered for private profit, with increasingly harmful consequences for society at large.