Data storage is already so cheap thanks to HDDs that a poor African country can afford to spy on its population. This will hardly change anything.

If we want to do something about it we have to revolt in the streets.

The tape may well be the better scenario.

With a pile of random access devices, the time and cost of a single record retrieve is low, though the cost of bulk records can get high.

All the oppressors need is a half decade window, maybe a decade to be pretty much golden, as far as totalitarianism goes.

The tape will definitely hold the data, and then some apparently.

But access costs go up.

The drives seem to encourage indiscriminate targeting.

Tapes would at least favor some priority.

The smarter bears will use both!

You are not wrong about what it will take.

In a world where we hold people accountable for stupid things they did or said when they were teenagers, I can see a lot of blackmail value in retaining data for a much longer period of time.

It is all bad, agreed. Was just musing over kinds of evil more than anything else.

HDDs are fine for short term storage, but they are too unreliable when you want to keep the data for many years, possibly for a lifetime.

Unfortunately, currently there is no other commercially available method of archival storage, except magnetic tapes. Optical storage has a too low density to be able to compete with magnetic tapes.

That presumes you're putting the data in cold storage somewhere. For data that's being kept accessible, the reliability of a hard drive doesn't matter. It's transferred from RAID to RAID over time. And spy data is probably in warm storage.

Nope.

Help me out here; which part are you saying nope to?

Archival...

Imagine saving BILLIONS of [data points](face,interactions,vids,text,etc) per person on hot or warm? NOPE

Life history will be on tape in the archives of such...

Except for videos, that doesn't take up a lot of space. The oppressive part is tracking everywhere you go and everything you say, which fits easily into warm storage.

For example, storing your position every 20 seconds might take 10KB a day. You'll collect 15 million data points in a decade, but each one is only a few bytes.

the problem I see, some entitity will dev an algo that will extrapolate between frames using corrolated data from even yet other users' info

so you subject-A at frame 0 then you have suject-A at frame 100

but no data from subject-A between - but you have data from subjects-b-------------j and can track subject-A in such....

extrap, and you have the "zoom and enhance" of surv....

scale of the infra cost... (the lifetime of a single person cost NxBACKUPS tapes...)

Edit: but i like your discourse

Can someone explain the Utah reference?

From Wikipedia[1]:

> The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), though its precise mission is classified. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center