[atoav]

In my (university IT) circles it is definitely part of the lived culture. IT sees itself as the ally of the users and not a data collector for the management. The management mostly agrees with the principle of data scarcity as well.

I recall one instance where the highest person at a university tried to get all the user's contact tracing data because of some incident (theft), IT explained that their request was not only illegal, but also useless, because the way data was stored would not allow to extract data without going to another official place and requesting the other half of the data which could only be accessed by the health department.

There is a german saying that goes a bit like: "where there is a feeding trough there are pigs". The idea of data scarcity is to avoid putting up things that can be used as food by pigs. So instead of defending data silos, you build them in a way that they don't become targets in the first place because they are of limited use outside of the intended use case.

Judging by the number of politicians complaining about data privacy, it works.