Three stories this week form a single argument about what data has become. GM settled a $12.75 million lawsuit for selling driver location and behavior data to insurance companies without consent. TikTok launched a subscription where your data isn't used for advertising, which is another way of saying: your data is the default product, and privacy is the premium. And Cowboy Space raised $275 million to put data centers in orbit. The logical endpoint of the data economy is infrastructure so large it requires its own rocket program.
The Privacy Premium Is a Confession
TikTok's ad-free tier is structurally identical to what GM was doing, just with consent and a price tag. Both treat user behavior as a commodity. The difference is transparency and transaction. GM's settlement suggests that covert data monetization is legally risky. TikTok's subscription suggests the industry's answer is not to stop monetizing behavior but to make users pay to opt out of it. This is the privacy premium model: data extraction as default, dignity as an add-on. TurboFund's fintech VC list is worth watching here, because the next wave of fintech plays will be built on behavioral data infrastructure that makes GM's dashboard telemetry look quaint.
Space Data Centers and the Scale Problem
Cowboy Space's pitch, data centers in orbit, isn't science fiction positioning. It's a latency and energy argument: orbital data centers can theoretically serve global coverage without the land and power constraints of terrestrial infrastructure. The $275 million raise is notable because it requires building the rockets first. TurboFund's seed-stage AI investor list tracks the infrastructure plays getting early attention, and orbital compute is exactly the kind of long-horizon bet that only makes sense if you believe data volumes will continue to grow faster than terrestrial infrastructure can handle them. Given everything else in this story, that seems like a safe bet.