One of the great truisms about our world is that the truly stupid ideas arise from people not understanding how the world works. Such is true of this latest idea that Facebook, and by extension companies like Google and so on, should be paying us for our data.

The contention is that this data is valuable and that’s where the mistake is: it ain’t. Certainly the information extracted from that data is valuable. But as anyone with even an ounce of knowledge of the real world should know, data and information are not the same thing.