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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Of course its also possible that some providers are keeping cell site records for a 4 year period but that seems very unlikely due to the storage costs

I'm confused. How the hell are they storying cell site records? This should be dirt cheap. Unique identifier for cell tower plus unique identifier for cell phone, plus minute by minute records.

Or at least that is my intuition. I guess I'll do the math.

(128bits + 128bits) * 1440 (minutes per day) = 46.08 kilobytes for a daily record of cell phone locations for an individual. (Assuming no attempts to simplify the data, like only storing the location changes).

46.08 kilobytes * 365(days) * 5(years) * 400 million(customers) = 33.6096 petabytes (about 8 days of YouTube uploads)

Petabytes of storage cost in the range of a million dollars a year. I'll say 2 million to account for deflation in the costs of storage over time.

So at most about $66 million for a 5 year nationwide database of all cell phone location records. This is chump change for any organization with the ability to collect such records. And I was estimating on the high end wherever possible. There are absolutely going to be a bunch of optimizations that would cut this cost by orders of magnitude.

And companies don't delete data to save money. That's insane. They all hoard data like there might be some nugget of gold in there if only they can algorithm it hard enough. Data deletion happens mostly by accident or neglect. Some piece of data is too old or has been mined so many times and produced nothing. It gets put on a server somewhere, but the server goes down and there wasn't a good enough back up, and the IT guys that proposed triple backup data protocol were turned down this one time because no one could figure out the business value of this data. The process of data degradation takes a decade or more.

The other process of data deletion is a legal request from the EU.

You could get a LTO-9 robotic tape library capable of storing a lot more data than that for a few million.

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