How long is your digital shadow?
March 24th, 2008 • Internet, Strange
Just tried a fascinating test launched by EMC that attempts to quantify my ‘digital footprint’. You can download the test here (thanks to Read/Write Web for the pointer).
According to a recent EMC-sponsored white paper (The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe), we’re leaving a vapor trail of 1s and 0s behind us every day, either in the form of stuff we volunteer (uploaded pictures, videos, emails etc), or - perhaps more interestingly - stuff that we’re not so aware of (telephone records, records of web searches, flight tickets etc).
I ran the test before writing this. My daily footprint is a little over 6300MB. I can’t say I’m surprised: by any standards, I’m a heavy user of gadgets and the web. But the real shock came when I launched EMC’s ‘ticker’, which tries to put a figure on the total amount of hard drive space I’ve swallowed in my lifetime. If it’s anywhere near the truth, I’ve chomped through 524GB of storage, all of which is presumably out there… somewhere.
Which I guess is EMC’s point: I don’t think twice about signing up to offers from airlines and online stores, then happily forget about it. Why do I think I’m going to regret that some time soon?
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the white paper suggests that the human race ‘created and replicated 281 exabytes of data in 2007′ (before you start counting on your toes, an exabyte is one billion gigabytes).
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