I was inclined to never delete an email rather than comply with 'your inbox should not exceed 500MB'. That was 50 emails a day then, my inbox now exceeds 500MB on a daily basis.

Sure, you can save archive locally or on a shared drive.

But the key idea... we don't want customer data because of liability. If we're storing it for a specific purpose, be that regulatory reporting or clearly defined analytics, fine.

Before the term 'big data', simply 'lots of data' sounded nice.

But don't let it hang around. At some point it will be a liability. You're serving customers. The key part of this is keeping their data safe. Not having it anymore (or having it in an non-accessible lock-away auto-delete repisitory for legal purposes) is more than good enough, to properly store and manage it is what's better.

Society decided, for now, the upsides aren't worth the downsides.

Oil is another parallel where society is currently just at the point where we are starting to not value the upsides over the downsides.

Comparing growth in data storage versus energy usage per capita is interesting.

Even if you look back to the founding of the U.S., the change in energy use per person is actually only a few fold, definitely less than an order of magnitude.

Harder to compare quantity of data storage but the change would seem much larger. How much data is there, per U.S. person?

Currently has value with externalized downsides.

I think the word "can" is acting as a euphemism or term of elision here, since "longitudinal data in healthcare" includes things like the Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment.

Odd. That's precisely what's happening with GDPR. While the EU governments are demanding that private companies limit collection and use of data, the intelligence arms of these same countries (I'm looking at you, GCHQ) and their FVEY partners are doing everything they can to hoover up and store every single bit of data on the world population, including their own citizens.

And somehow, we think this is fine. An entity with the power to disappear you and render you to black sites can have all the data on you they wish. But Facebook determining that there is an 83.7% chance you are stressed serving up an ad for vacation rentals is completely verboten.

It's absolutely mad.

I doubt GDPR will significantly affect information to which the government wants access

Can I ask the government to delete all information on me?

(Democracy)