Earlier quoted context omitted.
TFA, to me, touches about something I've wondered about a very long time ago... It was a little more than ten years ago for me. I realized that a hard disk could store a database of every human alive, including basic information, links (family relations) and maybe a photo. I still don't know what the implications are. Maybe we don't want to know, but it's not really that difficult to think about.
Is the storage really the complex part? Isn't gathering the actual information and avoiding errors (ex: I have a co-worker who's name is incorrectly spelled three different ways in prod services) the hard part?
Not for someone that works in consulting, or at least it wasn't. I remember that I had Access access to the production database that stored all the customers, present and pass. They wouldn't give me a password to that, but apparently they thought it was safe to enter the password without me looking so I could try some queries and test my last fixes.
Not sure if it still works the same, but I did some dumb query, left the computer on and, next day morning, a temporal file was in my %TEMP% with a lot of data of millions of persons worldwide. Had I be so inclined, with an external hard disk I could have started my homegrown NSA project.
Now think of this: how many times have you heard that the data of millions of customers were on sale after a data breach? Do you doubt that, let's say, China has every single person in the West on file?
Our own governments have us legally or semi-legally (exchange) anyway.