While I agree that there is a lot of hype around data as an asset/product, I think the author's being a little glib about its value. Clearly, in the current moment, targeted advertising is a huge trend, and I'm a little curious at which point the author thinks this will settle down. In the past few years all of the major tech giants have rode a wave of "data is power" to the top of the market, while companies who have struggled to do so effectively have fallen comparatively short. Targeted advertising has been shown in many studies to be more effective than traditional marketing and as a practice it necessitates the collection of large amounts of personal data.

And sure, there are costs to leaking personal data and then getting sued, but a lot of companies anonymize their data as a practice AND can't really be held accountable to consumers AND even if you do get sued, it's likely not enough to put a company like Google or Facebook anywhere close to going out of business.

It's reasonable to suggest that there will be some kind of government intervention into specific practices surrounding data acquisition, but I think a full overhaul or ban on personal data collection is unlikely: the moneyed interests simply value this data too much to allow for (American) politicians to disrupt its influence on their stock portfolios. Couple this with Congress's inability to act on numerous problems it faces and the fact that most current Congressmen and women (and their constituents) really don't consider this a top-tier issue and you've got a whole lot of reason for things not to change course. For data to become a real "toxic asset" there needs to be a dramatic sea change - it's not as much of an inevitability as the author suggests.