🤔 It’s all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

In a world of pervasive tracking (“this website uses cookies, please click ACCEPT“), our data gets used to nudge us, descending from the lofty promises of big data into a theatre of “data warfare”, a world where businesses seek as much advantage as possible from all the data they’ve been able to vacuum from customers, vendors, employees – and everyone else.

As organisations gather huge stockpiles of data, they seem to grow increasingly tightfisted with their data and insights. They’ve found a gold mine – why share? The problem with this line of reasoning is that it quickly dead-ends in a world where the only conceivable use of data is as zero-sum competitive advantage: “I know something you don’t.”