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One would imagine a case where some blood product recipients got sick after a transfusion, and the data would be helpful to narrow down the cause relative to donor histories.

I bet you could encrypt all the histories with a public key however, and only decrypt in such cases: private key held in a safe in the director's office, etc.

You are absolutely on the money here, however, as a rule it seems companies and their management feel that more data equals more power and potential income and so they are loathe to discard anything, even long after it has lost all value except to an attacker.

> This is exactly why large stores of data should be considered a liability and NOT an asset.

Your comment reminded me of a post by Bruce Schneier with a similar theme, called "Data Is a Toxic Asset" [0].

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...