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The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. World is serious about the judicious use of this resource and steps are being taken to save it. But our most important resource is not given that importance which it deserves.

NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.
Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. This newspaper has argued against such drastic action in the past. Size alone is not a crime. The giants’ success has benefited consumers. Few want to live without Google’s search engine, Amazon’s one-day delivery or Facebook’s newsfeed. Nor do these firms raise the alarm when standard antitrust tests are applied. Far from gouging consumers, many of their services are free (users pay, in effect, by handing over yet more data). Take account of offline rivals, and their market shares look less worrying. And the emergence of upstarts like Snapchat suggests that new entrants can still make waves.
But there is cause for concern. Internet companies’ control of data gives them enormous power. Old ways of thinking about competition, devised in the era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the “data economy” A new approach is needed.

Not going so far before a few years when I was in my teenage I used to chat with my friends through different social networking websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. Sometimes I wonder why these websites provide us free services, as we need to pay one rupee if we send a text message to our friend offline. I wasn't aware of it, that it was at a cost.

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From the month of January 2018, the day I started using blockchain based social networking platform steemit, i came to realise the cost — our data

We search for an item on Facebook number of times just to log in the same day do discover number of advertisements relating to those items we searched by the side of our timeline.

During the process we see some advertisements suddenly were we just fall in love with the advertised product and think of buying the same and in many of the cases we buy those products. In this way the social networks draw data from you which include your location your likes, your dislikes your desire and so on and sell this data to larger companies. These companies earn millions of dollars from your data and we are not even intimated.

Social network advertising revenue from 2014 to 2017 (in billion U.S. dollars)
Advertising revenue of social networks worldwide 2014-2017 This statistic provides data on the global advertising revenue of social networks in 2014 as well as a forecast thereof until 2017. The source estimated that in 2017, the revenue would amount to 41 billion U.S. dollars, up from 17.85 billion in 2014. A different source estimated that mobile social ad spend would amount to 23.39 billion U.S. dollars worldwide in 2017, where desktop social to 8.63 billion. According to a 2016 estimate, Facebook and Twitter together hold nearly three quarter of the social media ad market.

Don’t you think you should be given the authority to choose which data to share on social networks and to whom we should share it with a right to earn from the shared data?

this is what i think we deserve. I have waited for a solution to this problem.