Indeed, an entire industry of businesses – which operate rather euphemistically as “data-management platforms” – now captures individual users’ passive data and extracts hundreds of billions of dollars from it. According to the Data-Driven Marketing Institute, the data-mining industry generated $156 billion in revenue in 2012 – roughly $60 for each of the world’s 2.5 billion Internet users.
事实上，一个全新的捕捉个体用户消极数据并从中挖掘数千亿美金的生意行当已经产生——其中的企业被委婉地称为“数据管理平台”。根据数据驱动营销研究所（Data-Driven Marketing Institute）的数据，2012年数据挖掘行业实现收入1,560亿美元——相当于全球25亿互联网用户每人贡献了60美元。