Originally Posted by swise
This would be an incredible amount of data to store. Already the burden on systems just to handle the volume of music and video sales is imense. To add snooping to this would be crazy huge.
Accumulating this type of detail data is not uncommon. Many companies construct data warehouses to capture and persist this scale of data--there are already 50 terabyte commercial sector warehouses in existence. The value of this is the analytics/data mining abilities it affords internal analysts. The next time you visit a site like Amazon, think about what enables it to construct "custom" pages for you--that's an indication of the proliferation of this type of data storage and analysis.