Digital debt - Time to cull those unused accounts?

With greener “everything” being championed, lots of us are looking for ways to live our lives in a more resource-efficient way. From re-using food containers, cycling to work or sharing hand-me-down clothes there have been plenty of ideas posted and discussed online. One thing though that seems overlooked is considering exactly what impact our digital footprint has on the real world.

Over 50 million tweets have been posted by "akiko_lawson",  an account run by a convenience store operator in Japan..

Over 38.8 million instagram posts have been uploaded by "neipsclub", a meme posting account..

Over 1 million youtube videos have been uploaded by the "CODblackopsPS", a video game clip channel..

15Gb free storage for every google account. 11Gb free Dropbox storage. Flickr, iCloud, OneDrive, WhatsApp, iMessage. These and hundreds more services offering some level of data storage free of charge. And that's before we even look at the dozens, maybe hundreds of user accounts created in order to use a service; everything from an online store to restaurant bookings requesting you to provide data.

It's easy to see how this data can build up, even with just a few sites or apps being used and with each user record stored in a database, every image uploaded to Facebook, video uploaded to Youtube, email in your "sent" box or "trash" the data mounts up and needs to be physically stored. If you add to this the layer of resilience of the data storage, RAID configurations, archives and fail-over servers, you could easily be quadrupling the instances of each piece of data without even knowing.

Despite the operators of these services offering this storage free of charge, this doesn't mean there isn’t a charge. The fact is that data isn't free and we should all be responsible for keeping it lean. Even with Google's 15Gb free, that data is taking up real estate. Now data held as 1's and 0's on hard drives may not seem all that much of an issue, but with the world striving to be a greener, more environmentally conscious place we all have a duty to own the responsibility of the data we use and therefore the impact we are having on the planet.

The impact Data centres have on global warming is undeniable. Already they make up over 1% of global electricity use and this is only going to rise with more services and businesses "going digital". The global pandemic has likely boosted this over the past few months as businesses and individuals alike scramble to get their digital offering up and running, tracing and booking systems and online accounts being created for thousands who had previously not ever seen - or had - the need.

While the advances in compression of data and data efficiencies also march on, so does the demand and with increasingly power-hungry tech such as AI systems and quantum computing moving more into the mainstream it seems unlikely the figure will see a downward turn any time soon.

So with the old adage of "cloud computing is just someone else's server", passing the buck onto the tech companies to "keep it green" for us isn't the answer. Buying a field with money provided by advertisers in order to offset the pollution generated in part by the tweets or the latest cat videos do not leave our hands clean.

Obviously a complete tech detox is neither realistic nor desirable, but I do think we should all consider the content we are filling the digital world with, because while the bytes they take up might be virtual, the impact on the planet is definitely real.