Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Big Data Works Only for Those Who Hype It

The EU's antitrust watchdog is launching a new crusade. It's a bit premature.

January 5, 2018 at 7:00 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Seeing shadows.
Image: Saul Gravy/Ikon Images via Getty Images

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Margrethe Vestager, the Europen Union's competition commissioner challenging tech giants on several fronts, has opened another: "big data."

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she singles out data as an important competitive advantage that should be more seriously considered in antitrust reviews and investigations. Buying the mostly groundless big data hype is, unfortunately, often the flip side of a healthy concern with privacy.