[trympet]

> not doing so would just open them up to to the legal ramifications of data leaks.

They can already protect themselves by using pseudonymous IDs, and by not storing SSN and full names on the same system/network as your browsing history.

I'm struggling to come up with a general example where an adversary would be prevented from accessing the data if they had already compromized the network, so to me, it's just obfuscation with extra steps. Maybe if an adversary, by some miracle, had a non-root shell in database server, but somehow did not have read-permission on the crypto store ???

Physical theft of drives is a valid argument, but even that is a weak one. The data center facilities are very secure.

[kaba0]

Leaks can happen in many ways, like simply by SQL injections, some page displaying data without server side validation/with bugs, etc.

[trympet]

You are correct. Maybe I'm missing the point, but everything you mentioned is still applicable even when the data is encrypted.