Jan 10, 2021 · 44m · another-podcast
There's no such thing as data
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Benedict Evans and Toni Cowan-Brown deconstruct the concept of "data," arguing that treating it as a monolithic, ownable commodity distorts public policy, corporate strategy, and legal regulation. Through historical analogies and technical analysis, they demonstrate how digital information must instead be understood through its specific, relational, and aggregate applications.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 7.3 Guest teaching 2.3 Guest disagreement 1.3 The hosts pushing back 2.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 25:17 CCTV vs ID card paradox challenge
Toni directly challenges British privacy logic by contrasting their fierce rejection of ID cards with their acceptance of ubiquitous CCTV surveillance filming their every move.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 25:33 Refusal of the surveillance equivalenceBenedict rejects Toni's framing that CCTV is equivalent to ID cards, explaining that passive security cameras do not require state-mandated active identification from citizens.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 24:36 Highlighting the UK CCTV saturation paradoxToni points out the glaring inconsistency in British privacy attitudes, educating Benedict on how the UK operates more CCTV cameras than the rest of Europe combined despite claiming privacy rights.
The host holds their own ▶ 14:44 Dissecting EU CSAM regulatory contradictionsBenedict demonstrates deep regulatory insight by detailing how the EU accidentally banned automated child sexual abuse scanning through sweeping communication privacy legislation.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Demystifying Data as an Industry Buzzword | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Benedict deconstructs the buzzword 'data' and targeted advertising misconceptions, while Toni validates his thesis with her own experience of clients misusing 'big data' as a label for Excel spreadsheets. | |
| Telemetry, Aggregates, and Value in Data | 7 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Benedict illustrates the distinction between useless individual data crumbs and valuable aggregate telemetry, using examples from marine engines to open banking APIs. | |
| Platform Mandates and Shared Ownership Dilemmas | 8 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Benedict explains the technical realities of data sharing mandates like telecom unbundling and highlights the legal paradoxes of EU communication privacy versus mandatory child abuse material scanning. | |
| Consent, Photographic Privacy, and Data Borders | 7 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Benedict challenges Toni's premise about unilateral data ownership using the historical evolution of photographic consent laws and cross-border currency controls to illustrate modern data sovereignty debates. | |
| Cultural Philosophies of State Surveillance and Privacy | 8 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Benedict and Toni dissect cultural paradoxes in surveillance and privacy, with Benedict explaining the constitutional and philosophical differences between British common law and European/US regulatory assumptions. | |
| Data Categories and Regulatory Abstraction Layers | 7 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Benedict explains the difficulty of creating an intermediate regulatory abstraction layer for digital platforms without colliding with existing employment and copyright frameworks. | |
| Money as Data and the Prosaic Future | 8 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Benedict compares data to money and electricity, arguing that as digital technology matures, abstract buzzwords will inevitably collapse into prosaic, domain-specific regulation. |
Statements from this episode (14)
Evans: There is no single monolithic concept of data
“There's no such thing as data, because you have to ask, well, what do you mean when you say data? And there's not one answer to that. There's, like, 50 answers to that, and then there's no such thing as data. There's 50 things.”
Evans: Facebook's targeted advertising does not sell user data to advertisers
“Facebook sells your data. Okay, what does Facebook do? You're an advertiser, you go on Facebook, you say, I want to show an ad for a playgroup to mothers in Cardiff, and I've got 500 pounds to spend. Okay, we'll show that ad to 500 people that we, to a thousan…”
Evans: Disparate telemetry datasets cannot be combined to produce general AI
“Siemens has lots of telemetry data on wind turbines, and General Electric has lots of data, telemetry data on aircraft engines, and Transport for London has lots of touch-in, touch-out data on Oyster cards, and those are all different things, and you can't kin…”
Evans: User behavioral data is valuable only in aggregate, not individually
“So you have this data that's valuable only in the aggregates of millions of people. Not valuable to the individual user or meaningful in any way to the individual user.”
Evans: Direct communications data is co-owned, creating GDPR compliance conflicts
“I send you a message. Is that your data or mine? It's both, motherfucker. You send me a GDPR. Yeah, someone sends a GDPR request. You have to delete all that data. Yeah, but that's not your data. It's also my data.”
Evans: Building social competitors requires network data, defeating individual data portability
“If you wanted to make an Instagram competitor, I would like to see everything that you've posted and everything that you'd like, and I also want to see everyone you follow and everything they like, because that's what Instagram uses to give me recommendations.…”
Evans: EU communication privacy law inadvertently banned child abuse scanning
“So late, late in December, the EU had passed a law on privacy of communications platforms, which basically said you're not allowed to look at what people are saying to each other. And suddenly realized, just as this was about to go into effect in mid-December,…”
Evans: Regulatory proposals require Google to share clickstream data with rivals
“All these competition proposals that Google has to give clickstream data to competing search engines so they can actually build a competing search engine.”
Evans: The Open Internet Could Not Have Been Built in Germany
“If you tried to build that in Germany... Never mind all the other reasons you wouldn't have been able to build it, but you would not have been able to build that in Germany.”
Cowan-Brown: UK Has More CCTV Cameras Than Rest of Europe Combined
“The UK, the utter refusal of having ID cards and yet it's the country with the most CCTV cameras by far, I think you, if you put together all of the CCTV cameras of everyone else in Europe, the UK still has more.”
Evans: The US company-by-company tech regulation approach will not work
“Whereas the US approach is we'll see Google and then we'll see Facebook and we'll see TikTok and we'll see like one by one which will be like, and that's just not going to work guys.”
Evans: The Great Depression Happened Due to Unregulated Money
“And so we regulate money in ways that we didn't in the twenties and thirties, which is why we had a great depression because we didn't regulate money.”
Evans: Tech and Data Regulation Will Inevitably Become Mundane
“There's this enormous impulse on the one hand to come up with a sort of a TED talk or a book title that gives you know, the new capitalism, the new industrial revolution, the new market, you know, this, you know, the data is a new oil phrase, and on the other,…”