Lexpert Magazine

LEXPERT MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 2017 63 BY GEORGE TAKACH TECHNOLOGY But with so much data generated and accessed today, lawyers must take care to use it correctly The Dough Is in the Data IN THE DIGITAL world, so- ware and hardware are still very important, but data is fast tak- ing centre stage. Partly because there is now so much of it, but also because it can be analyzed (and therefore commercial- ized) very profitably, you will increasingly have to consider the legal, contractual and regu- latory implications of your data operations. In light of that, what follows is a primer on these important 21st-century data-related issues. THE DIGITAL SWARM First, just a few data points on the ubiquity of data and the sheer, immense volume of it. Consider the stream of data that a user creates when they are online. Every click they make, every site they visit, let alone every purchase they make (and every docu- ment they view, music file they listen to, movie file they watch, etc.) leaves an in- delible data print. An internet user's click stream is vivid and online technologies can easily capture it. But all of this still only captures the data users know about. Consider also the mil- lions of data items that an individual didn't even know they were creating, courtesy of the Internet of Everything (IoE), a rela- tively new phenomenon fueled by the data sensors lodged in virtually everything from homes and offices to vehicles. ese data generators are overlaid with the surveillance that is recording an in- dividual's picture and location hundreds of times a day (and sometimes thousands of times, depending where they live and work), and mixed with the daily harvest of data from a person's social media activity. A further source of data generation is the trend by makers of products to transform their offerings into services (or at least to add services to what previously was a stand- alone product). For example, the company that used to sell just fertilizer to a farmer now sells a service in which they will scan the farmer's fields from a satellite and ad- vise on the precise mix of fertilizer to put down and in which segment of which field, with the result that crop yields are greatly increased, and the farmer's total cost de- creases because he can use less fertilizer. e result for the fertilizer supplier is that it shis from selling a boring, low-margin commodity product to offering a critical, high-margin service — and one that is very "sticky" in terms of generating customer loyalty and reliance. e added benefit to the fertilizer com- pany is that it also now has a very rich data stream coming from this and thousands of other farmers. e company can now start to analyze that rich data, and provide to farmers even more services based on the data analytics that the company performs on the entire data set, comprising billions of data points each growing season. is trend for manufacturers of products to shi to become providers of services is occurring across a broad range of indus- tries. Consider the automobile. What was once an exclusively mechanical, physical device is quickly being fitted out with a range of tech components that allow the car company to offer a broad suite of driving-related (and some interesting non-driv- ing-related) services. And then the vehicle itself is becoming for many (especially single mil- lennials living in cities) a mobility service. is explains why some car companies are investing in ridesharing services. e result of both these developments is the creation, storage and usage of reams of data points that were unheard of even five years ago. In short, the various means of harvesting data in today's digitally enabled world pro- duces an awful lot of information. Every day. Without exception. In effect, it should come as no sur- prise that, taken collectively, it is esti- mated that the world generates about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day (that's 2,500,000,000,000,000,000). And keep in mind, that is each day. But this should not come as a surprise, given that each day 500 million tweets are sent; 4.3 billion Facebook messages are posted; and 6 bil- lion Google searches are performed. COMMERCIALIZING YOUR DATA TROVE So, your R&D team, together with market- ing and sales, have come to you with the news that they are ready to exploit your or- PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK | COLUMNS |

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