I mean, yes, but.. what's the solution? Never collect data? In at least some of those cases (and arguably all), that data does need to be collected and stored. What is the government going to do, not maintain birth registries, tax registries, land owner registries etc? What is a big business like a bank going to do, not collect customer data like your name and address?
I have a different view: it’s not the collection that’s the problem, it’s the firehose attached to the database. For the applications you mention, make aggregation over all records prohibitively expensive by design.
I still think there might be something here. You can allow certain aggregations (like “sum of the tax column”), but they have to be explicitly permitted; otherwise shuffle and hash everything enough times to make a single lookup sort of cheap, while a scan very expensive (plus distribute over enough physical servers and make the network between them low bandwidth to thwart lower level attacks). With enough regulatory or legal pressure on companies to lock down their data, paying this premium might start to look attractive; one could even found a startup peddling the World’s Slowest Database™!
Edit: what I was thinking originally was that in the world of paper-only archives, these massive leaks were all but impossible, yet business could still be done. It should be possible to combine this slowness with the convenience of computers.
I mean, that slowness is the reason we moved to computers.
That said this is certainly interesting, I wonder if there has already been an exploration of this topic. Could definitely make an interesting startup idea :)
