The Therapeutics Initiative’s Colin Dormuth is a Victoria researcher who already uses this information to study drug safety. After my article came out last month, he tweeted that allowing for-profit companies to mine our health data amounts to "data fracking."

Data is often referred to the new oil, but a lot of that data is in hard to get at.

What did we do one all the easy coal deposits had been mined, and all the "easy oil" had been pumped? We went for the hard stuff. The oil in shale. We fracked it.

We are moving from the age of data mining to the age of data fracking.

The issue is that big data has taken what I call little data for granted — they’ve assumed that they will be able to continue data fracking using cookies forevermore and that nothing will ever stop them from doing that.