Does the power of big data combined with location awareness result in our being supported by butlers or harassed by stalkers? There’s a fine line (or perhaps not such a fine line) between being helpful and being intrusive. Quite where it will be drawn is a function of commercial incentives, consumer responses and legal constraints (not least the new GDPR). In the public sector, the balance of those forces may well be different, but versions of the same factors will be in play. All of that, of course, is ultimately based on how we answer the question of whose data it is in the first place and whether we will switch much more to sharing state information rather than the underlying data.