OPINION: Ever since UK mathematician and Tesco loyalty card developer Clive Humbly declared in 2006 that "data is the new oil", we've seen increasing focus on the importance of generating, securing and protecting data. The sheer value of data was starkly demonstrated in 2014, when Facebook paid the then-seemingly exorbitant sum of US$21.8 billion to buy WhatsApp, a company with only 55 employees. More recently, we've seen control of data becoming a key element of trade tussles taking place between the United States and China. The comparison between oil and data is apt because both involve staggering sums, and both…
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