• Steve, there is actually a good deal of data that does get deleted. Any company's retention policy also includes when the data gets deleted. It is highly desirable to do so, because nobody wants lawyers in some future lawsuit to bet hold of information that they are not legally entitled to. Sony would have had a bit less embarrassment if it had an email deletion policy in effect. We are advised to dispose of tax returns over seven years old, because that is the statute of limitations for the IRS. So it seems counter-intuitive that some external entity can keep all sorts of things around, and we have no control over it.