Memes could be more dangerous than we thought, says Ian Hodgkinson, a professor at Loughborough University. The scientist has studied the impact of so-called “dark data” – data stored in the cloud but never used – on the environment.
About 68 percent of the data stored in various server centers is dark data, which practically goes into storage after a single use, never to be downloaded or transmitted again — whether it’s our favorite cat video or internet memes. Naturally, storing this data costs energy, i.e. electricity. It’s not much, but considering the traffic on the world wide web, small carbon footprints add up very quickly.
We realized that many people still believe that data is not polluted. However, every photo, Instagram post, or anything like that contributes to greenhouse gases.
Hodgkinson said For the Guardian.
He also stressed that a single photo does not cause a global catastrophe, but it is worth reviewing the number of photos we have sent to someone on our own phones alone. Many of them are stored in the cloud, and data centers consume a lot of energy and produce heat and noise.
According to some forecasts, such facilities could account for 6 percent of Britain's electricity consumption.
The easiest way to reduce this kind of carbon footprint, the professor said, is to not send so many unnecessary emails. “One of these emails is equivalent to about 4 grams of carbon,” he said. So the answer really lies in using these services consciously and deleting unnecessary images from our storage space.
Of course, this is not in the interest of cloud providers, because the more data we store, the more storage space we need, which costs more than free or smaller packages.
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