Data is said to be the new oil, owing to its enormous potential value, but it is unlike a typical resource in at least two outstanding ways that could keep its value locked away: One, few who possess it understand how to extract or account for its supposed value; and two, it doesn’t lawfully belong to them (at least not according to the General Data Protection Regulation).

“You don’t see accountants, for example, quantifying the value of data on a balance sheet,” said Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. Vellante and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus), his co-host at the IBM Fast Track Your Data event in Munich, Germany, set the tone for a special panel on big data monetization and GDPR. 

The rush to accumulate big data may be misguided in companies that have not drawn up a clear plan to substantially profit from it, said panelist Lillian Pierson (pictured, bottom right), data science trainer and coach at Data-Mania.

Although big data frameworks like Apache Hadoop let companies store large amounts of data in nodes for less than it has cost in the past, it’s still far from free.

“Each Hadoop node is approximately $20,000 per year cost for storage; so I think there needs to be a test and a diagnostic before even ingesting the data,” Pierson said.

Fellow panelist Joe Caserta (top right), president of Caserta Concepts LLC, agreed. Like crude oil, data is a raw material that must be refined into something of value, Caserta stated. In the case of data, that value is insight.

Machine learning models are the refinery system for data, Caserta explained. “Just like refining anything else, it needs to be controlled and it needs to be governed,” he said.

That central governance and C-suite business directives are needed to monetize data before the window of value shuts, according to the general consensus of all of the panelists.

In addition to Pierson and Caserta, the panel included Dez Blanchfield (top center), strategy and policy consultant for the Australian Federal Government and head of digital business and resident data scientist at Flexdata Solutions Pty. Ltd.; Ronald van Loon (top left), director at Adversitement; and Chris Penn (bottom left), vice president of marketing technology at Shift Communications LLC and co-host of the “Marketing Over Coffee” podcast.

“We should take care to centrally manage this data and look from a company perspective and not from a department perspective at what the value of data is,” Van Loon said.

This is not to say that the compute itself needs be centralized in one location; indeed, that may not even be possible given the growing mass of incoming data, Penn explained.

Even Google’s scalable machine learning library TensorFlow, advanced as it is, cannot handle all incoming data by itself, it seems. Google is now outsourcing some of those neural networks and the data to train them to edge devices with its new “lite” version for mobile phones.

“What’s TensorFlow Lite? The announcement of every Android device having ML [machine learning] capabilities is Google’s essential acknowledgement: ‘We can’t do it all,'” Penn said. “The edge isn’t the technology, the edge is actually the people,” he added. With this, the panel plunged into controversy around personal data rights and GDPR.

GDPR uncensored

Pierson wasted no time throwing down the gauntlet.

“I’ve looked over the GDPR, and to me it actually looks like a socialist agenda. It looks like a full assault on free enterprise,” she said.

It also happens to be “completely and wholly unenforceable,” said Pierson, who holds a JD of Law.

A main reason GDPR cannot be enforced, she contended, is in the way it grants jurisdictional rights to the citizen, making the law extra territorial.

Penn illustrated this feature of the new legislation by stating, “Say you’re a pizza shop in Nebraska and an EU citizen walks in, orders a pizza, gives you their credit card, stuff like that. If you for some reason store that data, GDPR now applies to you, Mr. Pizza shop.”

For a law to be enforceable, it must be enforceable in every element — in other words, not just for Facebook and Google, Pierson explained. “They’re going to call in the guy from the pizza shop and call him into what court? The ‘EU court?'” Pierson asked. The legislation has a whiff of opportunism about it, in Pierson’s view.

Attempting to balance the argument, Blanchfield reminded panelists that personal data hoarding is out of control and has been for some time. For the unconvinced, he suggested an experiment: Go to Google.com, view source, put it in seven-point courier font in Word and count how many pages it is.

“It’s 52 pages of seven-point courier font HTML to render one logo, a search field and a click button,” he said. “It’s effectively a mini operating system to figure out who you are and what you’re doing and where you’ve been.”

But isn’t this data-collecting why most people choose Google over Bing or other search engines, Pierson asked. Is it not why Facebook ads are the only ads on the planet that she and others pay attention to?

GDPR is not taking down those sites or their ad algorithms, according to Van Loon. It simply gives people the right to share their data with them or not.

But advertisements are not GDPR’s main concern; the serious data breaches happen each year despite security teams’ best efforts, Blanchfield stated. One such breach occurred just weeks ago on a Facebook platform called Edmodo in which millions of children’s usernames, passwords, email addresses and home address were hacked in one night.

One of those children was Blanchfield’s 12-year-old-son. “I got my hands on a copy, and everything about my son is there,” he said.

Blanchfield obtained a copy containing his son’s first and last name, mobile phone number and all of his personal messages within hours on a dark web site for free.

“Nobody has the right to allow that breach on my son or your children or our children,” Blanchfield concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the IBM Fast Track Your Data event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE