Privacy environment impact: the hidden cost of stored data

Privacy environment impact connects two topics that businesses usually treat apart: how personal data is managed and how much energy that management consumes. A survey by Veritas Technologies found that consumers understand the link and are willing to act on it. 42% of respondents said they would boycott companies that fail to reduce the production of useless or unwanted data.

What the survey found

Veritas, a company active in multi-cloud data management and cybersecurity, commissioned an international survey on consumer sentiment. The results place data management inside the environmental debate. 43% of respondents expressed concern that data centers produce 2% of global carbon emissions, and 56% expect companies to pay more attention to the environmental damage caused by keeping data online, by closing unused accounts and by providing guidelines for deleting obsolete information.

Ian Wood, the company's head of technology for the UK and Ireland, pointed out that the carbon emissions of data centers are comparable to those of aviation. The comparison gives the issue a scale that a privacy policy alone does not convey.

Data centers and future energy use

Recent research estimates that data centers could consume up to 8% of global energy by 2030. That projection turns storage decisions into an environmental question and exposes the hidden costs behind digital services. It also pushes organisations to re-evaluate the effect of digital storage and to look at more sustainable alternatives.

ROT data and dark data

The survey reinforces the argument with a measure of how much stored information serves no purpose. On average, half of the data companies hold is redundant, obsolete or trivial, known as ROT, or dark, meaning its value is unknown. Only 15% of that data matters for business operations. The gap between what is stored and what is useful is where unnecessary energy consumption accumulates.

The business case for deletion

Removing superfluous data returns more than it costs. Deletion improves regulatory compliance, lowers storage and processing costs and strengthens trust with customers, who increasingly expect the businesses they buy from to protect both their information and the environment. Wood argued that cloud-based storage does not remove the responsibility: inadequate management practices carry an environmental cost, and consumers are ready to reject companies that ignore it.

Survey methodology

The research was conducted by 3Gem for Veritas. It interviewed 13,000 consumers in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Singapore, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan between 1 and 16 February 2023.

The same reasoning applies at the scale of a household, where the privacy of a connected home depends on devices that keep talking after the invoice is paid.