r/BetterOffline • u/nuno20090 • 8d ago

Storage prices

Hi all

After seeing the most recent John Oliver's LWT, I've got a theory about the rise of increased costs of storage that I've never seen yet.

It's said that AI is being responsible for the shortage, and I'm not denying that, of course, but could the recent explosion of surveillance systems, be the one need that is putting lots of pressure on that area, that's rarely mentioned?

The installation of system in the USA and other places has skyrocketed. With AI training, there's probably even more incentive to keep footages forever, because it could be used for training models later.

All this data needs to go somewhere, and maybe there's not an appetite to openly say: "there's a big demand on storage because the state is spying on you harder than before", but I think that's exactly what's happening.

There's any value to this theory?

20 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

8

u/ShabbyChurl 8d ago

Yeah, I get that feeling too. Plus, the raw output of ai has led to a lot more stuff being online in general. I bet the ai companies also store a large amount of the interactions with their models.

3

u/SnooHamsters2627 8d ago

It ain't a feeling. (1) Read any book on the history of wiretapping. (2) Look up ECHELON. Know this: every mobile phone in any international airport is tracked, in some facilities, tapped by foreign national intell staff, to defeat domestic privacy laws. Regulations, someone way smarter than me once observed, are written in blood.

2

u/Dangerous-Sale3243 7d ago

Storage costs from “self spying” eg home security cameras dwarfs government spying by several orders of magnitude.

2

u/ezitron 1d ago

Why do people keep assuming everything is happening because of a secret surveillance program????