this is why anime waifus are superior. they can't steal your data cuz they're even more imaginary than AI girlfriends.

Corporate rule #1: If nothing says you can't do it, you do it.

Hence why many of those corpos hit the jackpot when they hoarded gargantuan amounts of data since the 80s simply because "that's something they can do and it might be useful later", and when they found uses for it, hired tons of interns and cheap labor to process and input that data into a computer-readable form before legislation catched up.

I recall having worked for one place where they got absoutely not affected all by a cutoff date of something like 2015 since all the raw data they will ever need is already harvested, and that cutoff also means the petabytes of records they got are now fully legal.

Just because they aren't using it now does not mean they won't use it later. Sometimes they get acquired by another corporation who will have a look at their new assets and think, "sweet! new training data!"

Only in one place I worked so far that they genuinely don't use that data but managers and marketing were pushy enough to give the legal department headaches, and last time I saw them, legal was pointing out to everyone that having all this data is a liability and that liability will be extra costly if they prove they aren't actually using that data, that they just hoarded it for funsies – new laws dictate if you harvest data, you MUST use it, no exceptions, use-it-or-lose-it, if you ever grant an exception, you proved that data is not strictly needed and you should not have collected it.