[akshayB]

The real problem is that data needs to be deleted over time. There is not much of a use case for customers for go back last year and see who called them and obviously there are use cases like criminal investigations or spying. But customer has no power or ability to dictate how long their records are store and how they are used. Companies should provide tools and features to their customers empowering them with their data.

[mountainb]

Non-murder criminal offenses typically have very short statutes of limitations.

A lot of this could also be solved by encouraging the federal government to enforce federal privacy law as written more aggressively. A good incentive would be to amend the privacy statutes to permit the FTC to keep the funds extracted from settlements and penalties in-house. This would allow them to increase staffing and create a positive feedback loop to deter wrongdoing. This would have a negative effect on incumbent companies and practices, but it would not take long for the message to get across and for practices to change accordingly.

Congress tends to prefer keeping agencies on its own budgetary string which paradoxically limits what the agencies are capable of doing. The laws that we think protect us do not protect us because many of them are within the exclusive jurisdiction of a federal agency with very limited powers and funds. In the US the leadership likes to create the illusion that it has made "Bad Problem" illegal by writing it into the law, but it does not like creating the conditions in which "Bad Problem" could be solved, whether it's because the tradeoffs involved are tough to contemplate or because keeping "Bad Problem" around as a visible enemy is clever politics.

[_heimdall]

> Non-murder criminal offenses typically have very short statutes of limitations.

There's a hidden assumption here. The expectation is that data retention and potential privacy violations are a necessary evil because anyone may later be under investigation for a crime. The data could go uncollected, it isn't AT&Ts job to retain private information on all of us just in case an investigator wants it.

Take telecoms out of it and consider a convenience store. Police would like to have video recordings of whatever moment in time they are investigating, but that doesn't mean the video has to be recorded and retained. A shop owner can choose to record videos and only retain them for a week if they want, or they can have cameras installed but not even recording if they're okay with just the effect of deterrence.

[mountainb]

Many civil claims have short statutes of limitation as well. It's not really that good for these companies to maintain regular business records going back to infinity that are subject to discovery in disputes that are not even related to anything the telecom company did. Complying with the discovery requests and subpoenas is expensive. The fetish for the somewhat imagined benefits of big data creates open-ended liabilities for these companies. But the pressure that law enforcement and the spy agencies put on the telecom companies to facilitate this has been an open secret for a long time now.

A lot of this is on the federal government and Congress for leaving an area in which it has power dormant and within its relatively exclusive control. Thanks for the conversation.

[willmadden]

That's another bandaid. The root cause is customer data collection mandated by outdated regulation. People should be able to digitally sign or provide a public key for their personal information without providing the raw text to 3rd parties. Various 1970's style government tax and regulatory rules need to be updated as well.

[softfalcon]

They have a financial incentive to never delete your data. Storing old data forever creates a perfect paper trail to sell to advertisers and perfect the shadow profile they keep on all of us.

I agree that deleting all your data after a year makes sense practically, but they'll never do it because it makes them too much money to keep it around.

[tantalor]

This isn't data for serving user needs, this is data for spying on users