IT has been two decades since British mathematician Clive Humby coined the phrase ‘data is the new oil’. The world’s largest companies — from Google to Facebook and Apple — were amassing large amounts of data on user desires and behaviour. This meant that these companies increasingly had more and more power to predict how people would behave. Think of it like a massive intelligence network to which users were willingly giving information about themselves all day.

In Pakistan, people do not always take these risks seriously. The assumption is that because Pakistan is not as heavily digitised as the West, there is less reason to worry about who has your data and what they do with it. The idea that one’s identity and the data attached to it is accessible to someone else is not something that has worried a lot of Pakistanis. Companies like Apple and Amazon that together have so much data on so many consumers in the West do not yet have that kind of penetration in Pakistan. As a result, these two behemoths, who have information on everything from a consumer’s heartbeat and activity and sleeping habits to the food present in his refrigerator, do not dominate the Pakistani consumer’s........

© Dawn