Introduction
The Economist1 reported that big data
companies (BDC): Alphabet (Google's ParentCo.), Amazon,
Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon raked in more than US$25
billion revenues in Q1 2017, a trend that typifies the
industry as 'the new oil'. Steady investment in acquisition
of Information Technology (IT) companies was recently exemplified
in Microsoft's US$26.2 billion deal for LinkedIn which industry
experts argue was essentially to have access to LinkedIn's
users' data.2 More so, IT has stimulated growth of
the knowledge economy and new industry expertise, viz:
data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Search Engine
Optimization (SEO), amongst others.
Central to the revenue of these companies is the mining of
users' data (using data analytics to understand consumer trend
and behaviour) which is subsequently sold to advertisers by
offering free, and to some extent, premium services, to their
users. This therefore calls to question issues of
