Photo source: Inside Sources
James Bond had it wrong — diamonds aren’t forever. Data is.
Its privacy ought to be, too.
Unfortunately, laws regarding who may access your data, how it’s accessed — and when — haven’t caught up to data storage technology.
As recently as 10 years ago, most data that was older than 180 days got automatically deleted from servers to make room for new data. This was necessary because of the physical storage limits of the servers in use at the time. The upside — privacy-wise — of this disappearing data was that it was no longer available to the government.
Which, under an out-of-date law, was legally empowered to access data older than 180 days without a warrant — or even probable cause. But today, there’s a huge problem, privacy-wise, because server storage capacity is now effectively infinite. Data is no longer automatically deleted after 180 days. It will probably still be there 180 years from now.
But the law allowing government to dig in to this data is still the same.
Read more: Data Is Forever…
