[antiframe]

Yes, but the value of the data has declined. If I am a business I would not pay the same amount or more for five-year-old data. Some portion of that dataset will be bad data. Some of the subjects will have had died, for example.

Decline does not mean zero, but the point is older data is less valuable. So, making your data leaking footprint smaller today will still provide you value (not infinite value though) as time goes on.

[freebuju]

Sure, the more recent data will always have a higher value if you are looking at massive datasets.

But I think if you look at this problem from an individual perspective. Key data that is unique to them doesn't change most of the time. Say a target person has dental issues and you have their phone number. There is a high chance that in 5 years from now, they still may require dental services and their phone number hasn't changed. They may have moved jobs, neighborhoods etc. in between but their need for dental service has remained constant and probably will into the future.

Let me give you another example. Say you want to run for public office, and in your young adult life some of your social media pages had questionable posts/media. Is this data any less valuable to your competition running for the same office?

I may be taking a different approach with this but a lot of nuances get lost in the numbers.

My point is once the data is out there on the internet, it can be hard to control it and/or assign value to it.