Sir, – I have listened intently to recent discussions on the exponential growth of data centres and their insatiable appetite for power from an already under-pressure national grid. However, until now I had only a vague idea of what data is stored in these data centres, and even less idea of my own personal responsibility for the situation we find ourselves in.
If you use apps or cloud services, as most of us do, and if you have photographs, old texts and emails on your phone or laptop, all of these items are stored in data centres. To make matters worse, when you delete an item from your phone it is usually still stored in the cloud, and therefore in the data centres, unless you delete from the cloud too.
It is estimated that between 30 and 50 per cent of all data stored in data centres is made up of the personal data – photos, texts and emails – of people such as you and me.
On learning the above, I took out my beloved iPhone to discover I have 8,134 photos stored (1,061 of which are videos). In addition, I have countless old emails on my phone dating back to 2015, including 643 I have never read.
RM Block
One only has to go to a concert, sporting event or scenic location to see cameras in the air loading zettabytes (yes, that is an actual term) more data into data centres, with the knock-on effect of increasing even more the demand for energy to support the storage of this data.
In light of this reality and my own personal responsibility, I will be spending a lot of time over the coming weeks pressing Delete. – Yours, etc,
GARY DOYLE,
Straffan,
Co Kildare.
