Petition for digital oblivion
On June, 24th 2024, I watched the Croatia v Italy match in Leipzig stadium and as I love taking photos and documenting events that I attend, I once again took some photos and shot some videos. For once, I took far fewer this time - the reason for this was that I wanted to experience fewer impressions of this beautiful event through the camera's viewfinder, but perhaps also because I sensed that I would be writing this article.
Because with all the data that was collected during UEFA Euro 2024, it makes me wonder what data and files should/may/must really be kept for the future. What is really important for future generations? What information will still be relevant in 100 years' time? To what level of detail do we want to pass on historical events to our descendants?
My family wasn't at the game, so I really wanted to share my impressions, from my perspective, of the game and the great fan gatherings, fan chants and fan marches. I was able to share footage from the stadium that no UEFA camera has captured. In other words, experiences that no one else created and - most importantly! - no one could filter - no government, no police, no state security, no UEFA. That is freedom. That is important.
My data belongs to me!
But: are my photos so relevant that they really need to be stored forever and ever on my devices (iPhone, my NAS at home) and external service providers (iCloud, WhatsApp, Mail, ...)? Are all my photos worth saving? Do I need them once I've shown them to my family and friends?
Aren't the official photos from UEFA and its service providers enough? What about the photos taken by freelance journalists and photographers? Aren't the statistics available in text form in databases, who played against whom and with what final score, which players were involved, who scored the goals, enough?
How long do we want to store data (various text formats, various image sizes, various video resolutions)? Transfer from one device to another every 2-10 years (depending on the storage medium)?
Data for eternity
UEFA will probably have stored the statistics from the 1988 European Championship in an SQL database, which was relatively new at the time but already existed. Or perhaps it was an MS Access database or even an Excel spreadsheet. But it probably wasn't much more than 10MB of data (https://www.uefa.com/uefaeuro/history/seasons/1988/ - anyone know more details?). The PAL-resolution videos from 1988 are now available digitized, but despite upscaling they are ugly to look at by today's standards.
An Access DB or Excel will definitely no longer be enough for the data volumes of the European Championship 2024. Unless you focus on the relevant data and forget how many meters Luka Modri? ran and what his maximum and average speed was, where he was on the pitch and for how long, how many passes he played and how many passes arrived successfully.
Who cleans up the planet?
The amount of statistical and visual data that will be generated for Euro 2024 will be huge. Every data generator will probably claim that their data is important, otherwise it would be deleted immediately. Which authority would decide which data should be deleted? Is it a government representative, the board of directors of a company, a data protection officer or a data cleansing officer a.k.a. housekeeper?
How much real storage hardware do we want to block? Hard disks and SSDs are made of various metals (silicon, aluminum, copper, precious metals, ...) and plastics. This is often forgotten, especially when we store files in the cloud. Because Google, Microsoft, AWS, Facebook, X, Instagram, ... also store our files on real hardware. What happens when we can no longer produce storage hardware because the materials are no longer available? Do we hope for future storage systems without limits and beyond our imagination so that we don't have to delete anything?
If you're worried about freedom of expression because opinions and comments on social platforms are being removed forever, one suggestion would be to use generative AI to summarize discussion threads and thus compress the data. Who has taken the trouble recently to simply delete files - especially before they spread redundantly across the web?
My petition is: "For digital oblivion". I would like to ask all those service providers who generate, store and duplicate data in a controlled or uncontrolled manner to be much more economical with their data. Perhaps row back and offer customers less storage space instead of more and more GB? Simply delete data that you no longer need. Otherwise simply compress it.
I would like to encourage each of you to think about which data is really relevant to you and justifies permanent storage.
领英推荐
For all lovers of statistics: Euro 1988 vs Euro 2024
Due to the similarity of the events, I have tried to determine the amount of data generated during the 1988 and 2024 European Championships. I have omitted some aspects, such as data collected as part of the operation of platforms, e.g. photos in all possible resolutions, comments and reactions in social networks, streaming, multiple forwarding of messages from chats, temporary files, in-memory storage, log files, messages in message queues, backups, logging of server and network access, etc.
Data storage in comparison with Euro 1988 and 2024
UEFA Euro 1988 in Germany
Estimate: Digitization of analogue media
Total: approx. 0.495 TB
UEFA Euro 2024 in Germany (https://www.uefa.com/euro2024/)
Estimate:
Total: 128.368 TB
..., which means that Euro 2024 generated roughly 250 times as much text, photo and video data. I have made very cautious assumptions, so I would like to hear your assessments and opinions.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version) from German version