How much data are we capable of generating on a daily basis?

The first thing we do when we wake up is to check the time or turn off the alarm on our mobile phone. This everyday gesture leads us to look at the accumulated messages and to enter social networks or digital newspapers to see what the news of the day brings.

In short, the first thing we do every day is to generate data with a "like" or simply by playing a video or entering the link of a news article.

We can say that generating and absorbing data on the internet on a daily basis is already a deep-rooted habit in the world and for which millions of people share. It is an act as commonplace as using a clock to organize time.

So commonplace that we can count the amount of data we generate daily per minute.

Data per minute

According to the infographic that Domo.com publishes every year since 2013, "Data Never Sleeps" in its 2022 edition (10.0), if we only add the data that users generate per minute on Google, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, the result is 239.607 million data per minute.

Data x minutes generated on different platforms:

This infographic from Domo referring to the data that continues to increase each year is a clear sign of the globalized world of the 21st century and unfortunately does not imply equal internet access among countries. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates that in 2022, 2.7 billion people still do not have access to the internet.

If we compare the percentage of internet access in Europe and America, 80% of the population online, to that of Africa, only 40%, we can see the digital divide that exists between regions of the world. Closing this digital divide is a challenge for the international community.

Meanwhile, 5.3 billion people worldwide currently use the internet and are the driving force behind the data that is increasingly difficult to measure with words.

Are we running out of words to measure data?

The data is immense. We are even running out of words, literally, to measure the amount of data produced. As reported by the BBC World portal, "the prefixes we have used to name the information (kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes) are no longer enough to describe everything that exists, and will exist, on the network."

The solution is to create new prefixes that will be used within the International System of Units defined at the 27th meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM).

According to BBC Mundo, these new prefixes are the first to be added since 1991, when zetta (10^21), yotta (10^24), zepto (10^-21) and yocto (10^-24) were added.

This gives us an idea of how rapidly the digital world is evolving and growing, in which we are all increasingly immersed.

It is inevitable to wonder if we ourselves can be defined by the data we share every day, every minute of our lives. The answer is yes.

A data-based profile

Thanks to the data generated with just one click and the information shared, for example, the place where we are, what we buy or what we have eaten that day, a very accurate user profile can be created.

Have you ever entered someone's account or profile to know who they follow or what they share and get an idea of what they are like?

That's how user profiles that are used to predict behaviors and tastes work.

Let's do an exercise. Just by looking at a Twitter user's account profile, you can know something about that person that the people who have known them longer may not know.

For example: in the profile description it says "very much into Graham Hansen, Christen Press and Alexia (soccer ball emoticon). Very much into the Caribbean Queens (volleyball ball emoticon)". This apparently doesn't make sense, but type those names in the Google search bar and see...

There you have it, the user of that account is a fan of three soccer players and the Dominican women's volleyball team known as the "Caribbean Queens".

You can reach that conclusion and many others by reviewing their tweets, likes, and retweets, and even by reviewing the other accounts they follow, you can predict or estimate their political ideology, nationality, musical and cinematic tastes, etc.

And that's just data from a Twitter profile!

We would have to analyze all the other data shared on the internet with YouTube views, Google searches, Amazon purchases, bank transfers, among other digital activities.

Even a digital profile may say much more about a person than they could tell in an autobiography.

This personal information allows for noting indicators and comparing them with other profiles to create communities, so that later companies, politicians, and developers can increasingly personalize their products and messages.

That is the reason why data has so much value in the market.

References:

https://www.domo.com/data-never-sleeps?utm_source=wire&utm_medium=pr&utm_campaign=PR_DNS10_22&campid=7015w000000vccjAAA

https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/blog/cuanta-informacion-se-genera-y-almacena-en-el-mundo/

https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2022-09-16-Internet-surge-slows.aspx

https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-63722409