You had me there, Simon
It's 9 am, I haven't had any caffeine, and my brain is still at the ambient Canberra temperature (currently 5 degrees).
Scarcely a day passes on which Vulture South is not told that an investment in Big Data software is the first step accruing undreamed-of riches. You know the argument: organisations that collect lots of data are sitting on a trove of un-articulated insights. A little Hadoopery and analytics will quickly reveal why customers …
Sadly, the article is actually spot on.
No industry minds the government imposing extra costs on them if it also applies to their competitors. The price they charge consumers just goes up.
And why wouldn't you mine the data once collected if you are a big Telco? Answer: because your tech staff only know about cables and are too incompetent to do it effectively. So you just sell access to the raw data to somebody that does know how to mine it, like Google. And then the Oz government on sells that analysis to their head office at the NSA.
"We're assuming that readers know of, or familiarise themselves with, Jonathan Swift's deadpan satire, the Modest Proposal before commenting on this piece"
I haven't read the "Modest Proposal" referred to here. However, I have read "Yet Another Modest Proposal: the Roentgen Standard" by Larry Niven. It is an excellent read and (if we had adopted it) we would be able to solve many of the world's current problems by giving sufficient foreign aid.