Comment by hakfoo

For years, I've been wondering when the data bubble was going to burst.

The whole "we'll make a TV with a $700 BOM and sell it for $600 because the viewing data is so valuable" situation. The "we'll burn valuable customer trust and loyalty for a $40k car because the insurance companies will pay us so much for the monitoring data." The grocery store desperately needing to track individual consumers rather than the aggregate "we sold 500 cans of Spam at this location today"

Civilization somehow managed to work for centuries without having to passively instrument every activity. So we can assume that what's being chased is marginal gains-- slightly better targeting and rates than we could get out of the information we were, as a society, comfortable with being public.

Does it really cover its costs? I always imagined so much of it was institutionalized FOMO-- "we must be data driven because our competitors are"-- and eventually someone's going to run the numbers.