[bnewbold]

I agree with the general sentiment here, but don't like the examples. 200 photos per person per year isn't very much! That is all fine.

What really bloats things out is surveillance (video and online behavioral) and logging/tracking/tracing data. Some of this ends up cold, but a lot of it is also warm, for analytics. It bloats CPU/RAM/network, which is pretty resource intensive.

The cost is justified because the margins of big tech companies are so wildly large. I'd argue those profits are mostly because of network effects and rentier behavior, not the actual value in the data being stored. If there was more competition pressure, these systems could be orders of magnitude more efficient without any significant different in value/quality/outcome, or really even productivity.