My wife takes thousands of photos every year, when my daughter was young she took even more.

When we were moving out of our apartment there was damage to a door hinge that we never noticed when we moved in but that had definitely been there from the onset of our two years of living in that apartment.

Guess what? I had a photo from the day after we moved in of that door hinge in a state of damage! Not because we took the photo for that intention, but because my daughter was playing in the hallway and my wife snapped a photo and it just happened to capture the damage. Saved me several hundreds of dollars in repair costs from my landlord.

You are right, 99% of the data will never be looked at. But do you know what the 1% is today? I'm guessing you don't.

Your example of personal family photos is in no way comparable to storing terabytes of essentially unindexed data for which one has no detailed knowledge about, under the notion that the government is somehow lighting a match to everything, and they're going to save it.

The government doesn't delete anything. It might be moved or inaccessible to the public but that data is somewhere in perpetuity.

It's one of the most deranged larps I've ever seen, then they pat each other on the back on BlueSky, desperately wanting to be a part of something.

These people envision themselves as folk heroes when what they really need to do is go outside and touch grass.