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Comment by rue | Hacker News Reader

But having lots of data improves your chances of having the right data when you figure out what it is.

When you figure out what it is, you may find you don't have the right data because you weren't asking the right questions, but you sure have the information security liability that goes with it whether or not there is any upside.

There are lots of ways to structure a database that will make whatever information you collected useless or worse than useless for your intended purpose once you figure out what you need to know.

I am inclined to agree with the article. If you aren't actively using it currently, why keep it?

Like all the data the NSA, TSA, and FBI dragnet stopped 9/11, the Boston bombings, Christian terrorists shooting up doctors and churches?

Oh, no, it doesn't. Not least because there's so much data even they have trouble working out what to do with it all.

One of the arguments during the Bostom bombings was that "if Boston had, like NYC, a fully integrated CCTV system automatically filming everything and allowing to track people across the city, we could have found the attackers more easily".

One has to seriously think about this. We, as a society, are signing away some of our most important rights for a statistically insignificant boost in security.

I live in Germany, but even here we still feel these changes, which were started with 9/11.

It's now the 14th anniversary of 9/11, and I have to say, long-term, Bin Laden has won. The western world has given up so many rights for the war on terrorism.

Giving up privacy just to collect more data, so we feel safer (while the data is just thrown away) is just another step where we forget that people are actually, well, people. With rights.

Right. Any data is useless until and if you know what to do with it.

Yes, and the liability part is that it also maximizes your chances of having the _wrong_ data when you get hacked.

The argument from the article is that old data isn't useful, current data is. So once you figure out what you want to look at, you can start looking at current information. Even if you have older records, you're generally not going to end up trawling your old datastores anyway.

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