16

Personal data play in the undergoingsocial revolution a role, which is as important for the economy as it is fundamentalfor the political choices. As their productionincreases exponentially, the exploitation ofthese data in the last decade has lead to agrowth of the Internet giants, such as Googleor Facebook, unprecedented in the historyof industry. But, despite their importance in the neweconomy, neither online activity nor dataflows are taken into account in traditionalindicators, such as commercial balances, orraw materials price indexes. The objectiveof this paper is to show the relevance of dataflows metrics to measure this activity, whichtoday stays essentially invisible. We first show how the data collectingindustry, based on the main intermediationplatforms, work. These platforms occupy adominant position in the world. In Europefor instance, they collect most of the personal data produced online, which is exportedto the US. We then establish a cartographyof data flows, based on some representative countries, including France, Korea,Egypt, Brazil, and of course the US andChina, giants in the field, which exhibitsthe knowledge asymmetries of the neweconomy.