[sogrady]

Disclosure: I wrote the linked piece.

When discussing the potential risks of data-oriented models, it's necessary to recognize that all data isn't created equal.

Facebook, Google and others are obviously trying to accumulate personal information in an effort to advertise more efficiently, but there are other models that involve no actual personal or company data. Operational telemetry, for example.

I might not want to share the data from a MySQL database, for example, but its operational characteristics: size, query length, query speed etc are substantially less concerning.

A company like New Relic, for example, could provide a service like the now discontinued App Speed Index because it has visibility into a large number of running application instances. This data, particularly in an aggregate form, poses little or no risk to customers that share it, but can be valuable to businesses that see its potential.