In 2016 something unusual happened. The five companies with the highest market capitalization were all from the technological field: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Apple or Amazon could become the first company to reach a trillion dollars in market value (equivalent to a trillion dollars on the short scale used in the United States). What is the common factor? They all exploit huge amounts of data generated by their own platforms. The extraordinary growth of data monetization triggered the inevitable declaration by experts in different fields that “data is the new oil”. In May 2017, The Economist devoted an article to arguing about the analogy of data and oil. It discusses how the Internet and mobile devices made data more abundant, ubiquitous and valuable. We all use multiple platforms where we leave a trail of in- formation, a fingerprint. These accumulated individual traces generate authentic oceans of zeroes and ones that establish patterns, habits, profiles that the owners of the platforms can exploit through machine learning algorithms to predict consump- tion trends, automate processes or hyper-personalize the customer experience. The Economist article also raised the risk that these new giants accumulate a level of power superior to that of Standard Oil at the beginning of the 20th Century. Scott Galloway explored the consequences a little more deeply in his book The Four, published in October 2017, in which undoubtedly outlines the end of innocence in giving the acronym GAFA - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple - unrestricted access to our data because, in contrast with this view of the data as oil, there are also some visions that warn that the analogy is not entirely adequate. Adam Schlosser of the World Economic Forum, at Davos in 2018, warned about the differences between one resource and the other. Oil, he said, is finite, and data, on the other hand, increases exponentially over time. The value of oil is in its scarcity and that of data in its abun- dance and availability. Oil is used once and data can be used and reused and shared for multiple purposes. Accumulating oil generates wealth, accumulating data only serves if it is structured and analytical techniques are applied to extract its value. A TWO-WAY PATH 68