Data Control

4Information: Contextualized and Materialized Data

“Big Data”, “open data”, “data mining”, “data management” and all other such terms have in common “the data” or earlier terms related to the “data” family. They are everywhere, and we produce them every day in our daily lives, and those with the increasing use of social networks, the Internet. These data are carried by smartphones, tablets, etc., and are accessible in a more or less simple way by companies or individuals. These terms refer to the way in which companies are led to manage the data they have or can dispose of on their customers, prospects, subscribers, suppliers, etc. In short, on all the parties with which they interact.

According to Henri Maler and Mathias Reymond¹, “The right to information rests on a single foundation: information is a public good that must be accessible to all and must not exclude any area of economic, social and political life. The exercise of this right does not only consist in the right to be informed, but also in the right to inform that journalists demand”^{1 2}.

The media and journalists are no longer the only ones with effective ways of relaying messages - just think of all those permanently posted on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. However, this multiplication of statements of all kinds, coming from a variety of sources, raises a simple question whose answer is less obvious than it seems: what is information? The word in itself, in its media sense, refers to facts ...