“Not everyone needs oil but everyone needs water, and the same goes for data”

“I think data is the new water. Not everyone needs oil but everyone needs water, and the same goes for data,” explained Or Lenchner, CEO at Bright Data. The company operates a DaaS (data-as-a-service) platform and helps 15,000 customers collect publicly available data. “There aren’t really challenges when you collect prices of products or news, or things that anyone can see without the need to log in somewhere.”

Despite alleviating some of the pressures by working with publicly available information, Lenchner argued that more could be done to protect privacy. “I think there is a lack in regulation also when it comes to collecting data from the open web, even if its public data you need to do it in a conscious way, in a respectable way, for the websites that hold the data, in a way that is ethical.”

You can watch the entire exchange in the video above.