The Intention Economy

7

Big Data

I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.

—Rudyard Kipling¹

THE ARGUMENT

Producing and integrating data sets of all sizes can be a good and useful thing—especially if customers get to do it too, with their own data.

In the digital world today, we leave clues about our lives all over the place. This is why there is a big business in “data integration.” Acxiom, for example, maintains billions of records on hundreds of millions of individuals, with up to a thousand “identity elements” per individual. These are built of data from all the following and more:

• Telephone directories
• Fishing, hunting, boating, and pilot licenses
• Property file and assessor records for more than 100 million ...