Nowadays, whether it is your mobile phone or computer, you may have all kinds of informative data. Gathering sand into a tower, these huge amounts of data can become big data, providing merchants with accurate development direction and obtaining greater profits.

Because of this, big data has become one of the most valuable commodities in the market. However, different big data owners in the market have different attitudes towards trading. This can be divided into three categories: trading insulators, market participants, and value dismissors.

A transaction insulator is a data owner who feels that his information is unique and important, and if it is leaked out of the market, he or she may lose its leading position, so he is reluctant to make relevant transactions. In the case of Mastercard, for example, the company chose to analyze the data itself and then develop other business opportunities based on the results, as the company already serves a number of banks and merchants, with more than 60 billion transaction records in hand to infer consumer behavior.

As for market participants, it is the holders who know that their data has market value and are willing to sell it on the right terms and at the right market price, such as ITA Software, the world’s fourth-largest airline ticket buying website. ITA believes that the company should focus on the business of selling air tickets and not for other purposes, so it is willing to sell the big data in its hands to other companies.

The last type is the value neglecter, who often only know that the data in their hands has a certain value, but ignore their potential value, so they don’t mind handing over the information in exchange for other benefits. Taking credit cards as an example, many small and medium-sized banks in the United States feel that the cost of dealing with credit card fraud is very high, so they transfer this business and related information to large financial institutions for processing, and as a result, a well-capitalized American bank such as MBNA can be a single company that covers most of the market business.

Having said that, big data in Hong Kong is still a huge market that needs to be developed by the private sector to enhance business growth. Public bodies can be used to obtain information on crime. If the development of big data in Hong Kong is to be promoted, the government needs to devote more resources to establishing a robust and fair data trading mechanism to protect traders and encourage more market participants to participate in it.