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By Julie Lockner
Everyone knows that in the United States you are supposed to keep your tax data for seven years just in case you get audited. But is there a hard and fast rule for how long you should keep your business data or personal data? This is a tougher and tougher question now that data has proliferated and is much more challenging to manage on a personal and professional level.
With data being the obsession of business executives, entrepreneurs and IT technology investors, there’s a justification to want and store increasing amounts of data. Big data is opening incredible new opportunities and the promise of potential insight is just too luring to let the data go. Yet, some would claim the economics of storing data has shifted from a matter of cost to one of risk. Do we have an obligation to retain data that could be used to improve humanity? And if the answer is yes, how long do we need to keep it? Or should we destroy data after it has served its usefulness to reduce the effects of potential breaches? How do we know that the data has been safely disposed of so malicious intruders cannot get their hands on it?