Once Smitty's computer was disconnected, it looked like a piece of cold machinery, not necessarily a means of violating patient privacy. Because it is not as visible as filing cabinets full of paper, volumes of electronic data tend to grow and stay in storage much longer than paper records. Email systems that allow employees to store messages make every employee a keeper of corporate records. The sheer quantity of data produced and held by companies, and the burden of going through it all may give rise to corporate liability. Consider again the discovery process.
Many lawyers consider discovery to be one of the most burdensome aspects of practice.
The currently accumulating masses of electronic data will assuredly increase that burden many times. It may come to pass that the key threat of discovery is no longer production of the smoking gun, but the discovery process itself. In the same way that there are retention policies for paper, there ought to be such policies in place for electronic data. Technology has long created new careers. There need to be people to create and maintain hardware innovations.