I think you miss the point of the article, which precisely says that we store a ton of data we don't need to store in the first place. Photos of kids are obvio

I think you miss the point of the article, which precisely says that we store a ton of data we don't need to store in the first place. Photos of kids are obviously not part of that "crap" (even if we have too many of them and it would be worth triaging for our own sake). The question is: what makes for most of that data? Is that all business records, or is that storing stuff because we can? I've worked in multiple startups, all were tracking users as much as they could. Adding tools that collect data is easy, and storing that data is cheap. "We may need it later". Never needed any of that crap, and it was invading our users' privacy. In any case, I think the article raises a good point: it's so cheap to store crap that we don't even think about it. And it's bad for the environment. Just like it's so cheap to take a plane that we don't think about it, even when taking the train takes almost the same time.