Word.ws English Dictionary

dark data

dark data noun: data that are unanalyzed, inaccessible, or not organised in such a way that they are readily available.

Noun

dark data pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) Data that are unanalyzed, inaccessible, or not organised in such a way that they are readily available.
    • For those who seek surveillance revenues, dark data represent lucrative and necessary territories in the dynamic universal jigsaw constituted by surveillance capitalism's urge toward scale, scope, and action. Thus, the technology commmunity casts dark data as the intolerable “unknown unknown” that...2018, Shoshana Zuboff, chapter 7, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
    • But that diagnosis of what had gone wrong was incorrect. Later research showed that the real problem was dark data. Shortly after the election, researchers chose a random sample of houses and knocked on the door to ask people if and how they voted.2020, Tim Harford, “Rule six”, in How to Make the World Add Up, Bridge Street Press, →ISBN

Questions about dark data

What does dark data mean?
Dark data means data that are unanalyzed, inaccessible, or not organised in such a way that they are readily available.
What part of speech is dark data?
Dark data is a noun.

Words near dark data in the dictionary

  1. dark cultures
  2. dark current
  3. dark currents
  4. dark cutter
  5. dark cutters
  6. dark data
  7. dark earth
  8. dark elf
  9. dark elves
  10. dark empath
  11. dark empaths

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dark data (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dark data.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dark_data. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.