It is said that, in 2006, Clive Humby, a British mathematician and, among other things, the architect of the Tesco loyalty card program, stated “data is the new oil”. What has been often missed is the extension of that statement, later brought by Michael Palmer, “Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.”
Humby’s statement, and Palmer’s extension, became adopted by many communities, including the cybersecurity one, and it was recently mentioned during a keynote on recent cybersecurity Operational Technology attacks trends in the Ukrainian war context at a 2023 Cybercrime Conference.
While one should not expect analogies to be a perfect map between cultural concepts, it comes natural to semiotically link the instruments of the oil supply chain to respective data ones. For example just by stating that “if data is the new oil, databases are the new oil storage tanks”. That must have been used as many times as the data oil analogy.
It is probably less known that, simultaneously with Humby and Palmer coming out with their mottos, many researchers had started to work on the privacy preserving data mining operations over large data collections. In particular, in Palo Alto, among the corridors of the illustrious HP Laboratories, a group of cryptologists had been working on the privacy preserving verification of aggregated queries on outsourced databases. That work, published in an article made publicly available in 2006/2007, presented the scientific community with the problem of
