[52-6F-62]

I previously worked under the umbrella of a major Canadian telecom (though in their media arm—radio, publishing, television).

I'd heard they gathered a large amount of data, but more to do with the trend of just hoovering up every bit possible and store it in their data lakes.

My understanding at the time is they had no idea what to do with it.

Some of these initiatives could be rooted in little more than some manager wanting to stamp `mined data lake using machine learning and AI to generate $(x) in $(m)`. It doesn't have to actually mean anything.

That said, maybe they've discovered a route to more revenue, hence the push.

edit: Should clarify this was in Canada when the linked article is about the US.

[kitteh]

Was this Rogers New Media? Just curious because my recollection is that they owned the network infrastructure for the cable internet side and were the first folks in Canada to go big on deep packet inspection boxes (aka Cisco pcube, which was from an acquisition of an Israeli compamy) to deal with "undesirable" traffic but also mining customer data.

[52-6F-62]

I didn't work on that side of the company so I can't comment with accuracy (the entire entity was around 25,000 people at the time). Only what I've heard along the way. I know they wanted to leverage the data, but I didn't gather they had necessarily developed much use at the time. They were definitely interested in collecting data, however.

edit: I'd like to add a disclaimer that my comments are as good as hearsay. I just wanted to add them for context.