3 ms·

The other interesting technology vector related to security is cost of storage. I ran some numbers on storing 100 bytes of location metadata per minute per per

The other interesting technology vector related to security is cost of storage. I ran some numbers on storing 100 bytes of location metadata per minute per person. Assuming 85% compression and using current S3 storage costs of $0.03 GB per month it costs about $0.03 to store ten years worth of personal location data. Extrapolating out to a population of 300M that gives you a yearly cost of about $8.5M, which appears to be the same cost as building 2.5 miles of freeway in California. Basically there's no longer an economic barrier to storing almost unlimited amounts of metadata for individuals. The fact is we just don't generate that much. And the costs will only decline over time. (Would love it if somebody could run the same numbers and see if the result is replicated.)

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
60 * 24 * 365 * 100 * 10 * 0.15 / 1000^3 * 0.03 * 12 = 0.02838 So, you mean cost per year? Note that S3 is extremely expensive. Pure storage media cost with hard disks is around 0.001 USD per GB-month unreplicated--and replication might not necessarily be a priority, depending on the goals one has with that data collection. Also, that would give you about 1 m precision at one second intervals, which might be excessive (or not). Really, there is no longer an economic barrier to storing "real" (as in "non-meta") data. 24/7 audio recording in telephone quality with ten year retention would cost about 4 USD/year in pure storage cost at current prices per person. Or in other words: storing all phone calls forever doesn't really cost anything. Actually, it's so cheap one can expect that the NSA is already doing it.