"The value of a solution comes from the problem being solved."

A new TV came into the family. I helped install it. When the user agreement came up I took a peek at the privacy section. It's a bit aggressive. Essentially, the TV vacuums up all data from your interaction with it, including screenshots. This data will be shared with partners, a.k.a. "sold." Who wants this data? The agreement suggests someone thinks some part of this data may one day be as valuable as oil. Someone's told them the value of data depends on the problem being solved, right?
I have been working on a lead generation campaign. In the testing phase we picked a goal, measured where we are today, and imagined where improvements would show up. A classic "today, tomorrow, and value of the difference" exercise. The key piece in determining the value of the project depends on a piece of data no one has. If it existed, we'd buy it. For a lot of money. The data element doesn't exist. This isn't a problem. We work around the missing info and a few months later guess what we have? A lot of the data we couldn't buy in the marketplace.
The problem with massive data gathering is the value of this data is going to come from the market of problems it solves. By grabbing everything and selling it to the data brokers who don't know if anyone wants to buy it, you're getting pennies per user at best. It has to be a fraction of what you make by selling the TV to begin with, so why bother?
I'm guessing someone somewhere in the organization said "it's free money, go get it." I wonder if that same person knows their TV brand is a top result under "privacy nightmare" in Google searches? I also wonder if it matters to anyone but me. . .
Anyway, as you can imagine, the TV is great. Turns out once you've made a hole in the wall and mounted the screen, a corporate data collection policy doesn't matter so much.
(something the finance person must have already known)
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