The postal service has been doing this for decades. I once did data entry for the postal service; I would type in the addresses from the images of scanned mail

The postal service has been doing this for decades. I once did data entry for the postal service; I would type in the addresses from the images of scanned mail pieces where the systems couldn't OCR the address/route by some other means. The actual mail and I were almost always in different states. That was the mid 90s. Which means they were imaging pretty much everything way back then. While the OCR and facilitating the manual entry processes are a couple of uses, I am quite sure those images had many uses with the right kind of imagination... perhaps even today... What I don't recall/remember ever knowning is if there was a retention policy....