> The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value. That's a dangerous assumption to make, even irresponsible post-2008. It's

> The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value. That's a dangerous assumption to make, even irresponsible post-2008. It's also a fallacy which gets used by scammers often. For example, some in the spam industry relied on that fallacy to sell malvertising schemes to rubes. Because somebody must be making money off spam, right? But the scam is selling the scheme/software to enough spammers to extract a nice living before each of them predictably jumps ship. So the answer could be, "no, they aren't making money," or, "maybe, but you won't be," and the incentive to sell the systems is still there. Data may have value, but continued investment in it is certainly not enough on its own to elucidate what that value is.