J.R.McHale

“[B]ecause the cost of saving all this data is so cheap, there’s no reason not to save as much as possible, and save it all forever. Figuring out what isn’t worth saving is hard. And because someday the companies might figure out how to turn the data into money, until recently there was absolutely no downside to saving everything. That changed this past year. What all these data breaches are teaching us is that data is a toxic asset and saving it is dangerous . . . . . We can be smarter than this. We need to regulate what corporations can do with our data at every stage: collection, storage, use, resale and disposal. We can make corporate executives personally liable so they know there’s a downside to taking chances. We can make the business models that involve massively surveilling people the less compelling ones, simply by making certain business practices illegal.”

— Bruce Schneier: Data is a Toxic Asset at his website Schneier on Security. Read the whole thing.