Word.ws English Dictionary

datenkraken

datenkraken noun: internet-oriented companies that have a large number of users and possess detailed personal information on them, presumably without their consent.

Noun

datenkraken pl (plural only)

  1. (derogatory, plural, plural-only) Internet-oriented companies that have a large number of users and possess detailed personal information on them, presumably without their consent.
    • It is a narrative that has cast the American datenkraken as the arch enemy.2014, Juliette Garside, The Guardian., Europe gears up to fight back against giant US beasts of the internet

Origin of datenkraken

Borrowed from German Datenkraken, plural of Datenkrake, itself a compound of Daten (“data”) and Krake (“octopus”), invoking an imagery of such a company being an octopus having its virtual "tentacles" deeply penetrating its users' online habits.

Questions about datenkraken

What does datenkraken mean?
Datenkraken means internet-oriented companies that have a large number of users and possess detailed personal information on them, presumably without their consent.
What part of speech is datenkraken?
Datenkraken is a noun.

Words near datenkraken in the dictionary

  1. datelines
  2. datelining
  3. DATEM
  4. datemark
  5. datemarks
  6. datenkraken
  7. datepalm
  8. datepalms
  9. dater
  10. daters
  11. daterview

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: datenkraken (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: “datenkraken.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/datenkraken. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.