If anyone would like an elaboration of this metaphor, I highly recommend these slides from Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard: http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

One important takeaway here is that if you think the "worries over tech firms" and their data are bad now, just wait until there's a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl level incident with all their data, like millions of identifable browsing records or grindr logs being dumped on an onion site somewhere.