Comment by JohnFen
7 days ago
I seriously doubt any of the companies doing this will preserve the scans for very long. It costs money to store stuff, and none of these companies are have any concern for anyone who isn't them, so they're not going to spend the money or lift a finger unless they work out a way to make it profitable.
archive.org estimates it costs $2/GB to store data in perpetuity (well, at least until decades of storage scaling trends stop of course). That's probably less than it costs to acquire and scan the data in, I'd be surprised if they just tossed it out at the end when it's so cheap to store. The same thing happened at the healthcare data lakes I worked on where the trend switched from the usual "how long are we legally required to store this information" to "how long can we legally hold this information".