Imagine you’re Visa. You’ve got terabytes of personal data on millions of customers, and it all has to go somewhere. The cheapest solution is tape storage, which you keep in a secure room and write all that sensitive stuff to. Then, when the time comes to archive it somewhere cool and dry, like a storage facility, you put it on the truck, and it disappears en route. Uh oh, spaghettios!
This is apparently a pretty serious problem, as confidential customer information is worth its weight in gold these days and a struggling truck driver could earn quite a piece if a few storage devices went missing between corporate HQ and the warehouse. So Fujifilm is offering a LoJack-designed tracker to put in its storage devices, allowing Visa to be sure they’re going where they’re supposed to go. It costs $150 per month per device, though, so that surety comes at a cost — but it’s probably less than the cost of a 30,000-member class-action lawsuit resulting from mass identity theft.
How long do you think it’ll be until we’re tracking our pizza?