Study: amount of digital info > global storage capacity

An IDC research study sponsored by information management giant EMC provides insight into the explosive growth of digital information. IDC uses a complex formula to estimate the size of the "digital universe," the total volume of digital information that is created and replicated globally.

They say that this number reached 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes) in 2007, which adds up to about 45GB of digital information for each person on earth. For the first time ever, the total volume of digital content exceeds total storage capacity. IDC speculates that, by 2011, only half of the digital universe will be stored.

IDC attributes accelerated growth to the increasing popularity of digital television and cameras that rely on digital storage. Major drivers of digital content growth include surveillance, social networking, and cloud computing. Visual content like images and video account for the largest portion of the digital universe. According to IDC, there are now over a billion digital cameras and camera phones in the world and only ten percent of photos are captured on regular film.

The study also reveals that the volume of information about us generated automatically on a daily basis surpasses the total volume of digital information that we actively create about ourselves. IDC notes that this trend has significant privacy implications and that pressure will increasingly fall on the IT sector to address information management issues that pertain to privacy.

My personal daily digital footprint

"We discovered that only about half of your digital footprint is related to your individual actions—taking pictures, sending e-mails, or making digital voice calls," IDC senior vice president John Gantz said in a statement. "The other half is what we call the 'digital shadow'—information about you—names in financial records, names on mailing lists, web surfing histories or images taken of you by security cameras in airports or urban centers. For the first time your digital shadow is larger than the digital information you actively create about yourself."

Another issue addressed by the IDC study is the environment impact of digital content growth. High turn-over rate for mobile phones and other electronics create a lot of "eWaste" and power consumption in data centers is climbing at an extremely rapid pace.

Although the methodology that IDC uses to compute the total volume of digital content encompasses a lot of hand-waving and some unverifiable assumptions, the trends documented by the study seem quite defensible. The rapidly accelerating expansion of the digital universe will undoubtedly continue as new and better technologies make information easier to produce and distribute. As the total amount of information grows, so too will the privacy risks associated with our expanding digital shadows. One can only hope that the evolution of privacy safeguards will manage to keep up.

Further reading

• IDC's report in PDF form 
• You can calculate your own digital footprint with Mac OS X and Windows apps