Yes, that�s right: 3.6 zettabytes!
A report entitled �How Much Information� by the University of California in San Diego, released today, said the average person in the U.S. consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. That�s just at home.
The number of bytes we consumed increased at six percent per year from 1980 to 2008, the report said.
TV and video games are responsible for a big chunk of that. People are reading more too, since browsing the web is considered reading.
The report says �We estimate that an average American on an average day receives 11.8 hours of information a day.�
The project was funded by AT&T, Cisco Systems, I.B.M., Intel, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology, with early support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The report didn�t mention security, but, basically a lot of that data needs some kind of security protection. �Ten years ago 40 percent of U.S. households had a personal computer, and only one-quarter of those had Internet access. Current estimates are that over 70 percent of Americans now own a personal computer with Internet access, and increasingly that access is high-speed via broadband connectivity,� the report said.
Yep, 3.6 zettabytes per year � that�s a 36 with 20 zeros. It really puts the security issue into perspective (if you can wrap your head around the concept of a "zettabyte.")
NYT story here.
Univ. of Calif. study report here.
Tom Kelchner
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