Barry Collins wants our data to be deleted the moment it reaches its sell-by date
Think of the all incredible things we’ve done over the past couple of decades to reduce waste. We go to extraordinary lengths to preserve energy - meticulously sorting our rubbish into eight separate colour-coded bins to ensure it’s recycled properly; pumping the walls of our houses with hamster bedding to prevent heat from escaping; spending the first 10 minutes at home on a winter’s night in toe-stubbing, shin-cracking darkness while we wait for the energy-saving lightbulbs to warm up. And yet, in other ways, we are incredibly wasteful.
Take data. It’s mushrooming at an uncontrollable rate. I went to look up a figure for the estimated amount of data in the world today, but it’s absolutely meaningless to you (and me). You couldn’t grasp the scale of a quintillion exabytes of data (or whatever the figure is) any more than you could count the number of atoms in Berkshire. It’s beyond comprehension.
What’s easier to understand is the scale of Google’s data centres. Visit www.google.co.uk/about/datacenters/ gallery and look at the photo galleries. They show football stadium-sized buildings stacked full of servers, with kilometres of coloured pipes pumping huge volumes of water around the buildings just to keep the servers from cooking. Google insists these are state-of-the-art, energy-efficient campuses, but even still, they use more power than hundreds of thousands of homes.
Why does Google (and Microsoft, Facebook and dozens of others) need these massive data factories? Because we're hopelessly wasteful with data. The 5GB of emails in my Gmail account include tens of thousands of unmemorable messages I’ve never bothered to delete. I’ve got Hotmail messages stretching back as far as 1998, containing nothing more important than which pub I was meeting my then-girlfriend in. I’ve got thousands of old contacts in a now-defunct Yahoo account, and all of this absolute guff will be stored in triplicate in servers dotted around the globe, on the off-chance I might ever need it. I won't.
It’s the same at home. I’ve got hard drives stuffed with tens of thousands of photos I’m never going to look at again, along with work documents going back 15 years, 99 per cent of which haven’t been opened since the day they were saved. And, because I’m a good boy, all of this data is backed up on multiple hard drives and online - gigabyte upon gigabyte of data that I maintain purely because it’s easier to keep than it is to sort out.
What we really need is a digital time bomb: an expiry date on every digital photo, email, document and other digital file. Fail to even look at that file for three years and Windows or your online service deletes it; open it up and the clock resets for another three years. Once a month you’re given the option of reviewing the files headed for the recycling bin, and those not plucked out of the pile are permanently purged. Use it or lose it.
It sounds draconian. Reckless, even. But you don't need all that data; you just think you do. And if Google needs a few less Wembley-sized server silos to store our data in, it will do far more for the environment than sticking your potato peelings in the brown bin.