You wrote, "And many have talked about data being the ‘new oil’ when really it should be reframed as radioactive waste." It's true that privacy regulations hav

You wrote, "And many have talked about data being the ‘new oil’ when really it should be reframed as radioactive waste." It's true that privacy regulations have made personally identifiable information (PII) into something that is challenging to store, like radioactive waste. But most of the world's big data is not PII. For example, the huge amount of data being produced by modern telescopes and particle physics labs is about things like stars and subatomic particles, not people. The world has less than 8e9 people, but there are around 1e11 stars in our galaxy, and there are more than 1e11 galaxies in the observable universe.