[dannypgh]

I think you're orders of magnitude off in marginal cost estimates for glacier users. Datacenters are being built out for a small number of commercial users (e.g. Amazon's core business) and the size of modern HDDs would lead me to estimate that storage is about free in a modern datacenter, the scarce resource is disk-time for read/write operations. That is, projects like glacier let Amazon sell disk that would have otherwise been stranded.

It is also the case that a consumer level service like glacier presumably has more redundancy than what might be needed for best-effort storage of these recordings, where losing any fraction of them wouldn't really be a problem.

[cryptarch]

I'm not in the datacenter business, so I've been conservative for lack of experience with storage at PB scale.

I've chosen to err on the side of estimating it to be more expensive, because I think that makes the end result more convincing:

30m is chump change for parties like Amazon, and in reality it'll cost significantly less. 1m might well do. Maybe it's less still. You could combine flagging users with flagging low-certainty or keyword-containing transcriptions.

Either way, you don't need collusion with intelligence parties, just an unscrupulous or naive exac at Amazon that thinks the data might be worth a lot for training future learning models. Of course the more sinister but legal reselling to government agencies is a financially attractive option as well.