MyDataMyPollution – MDMP

Create a tool that calculates the carbon emissions from your cloud storage, provides solution for reducing cloud use, and offers cleaner alternative.

Smartphones are perhaps the most visible and prevalent tools on Trinity’s campus they are inseparable from students and academics alike. What is less visible is the immense computing power it takes to process and store their data, in the Cloud. The Cloud is an obscure concept at the best of times, which conjures up images of clean white spaces in Silicon Valley where data is transferred through satellites, directly to your phone, when in reality the process involves energy intensive data centers across the globe constantly running programs to download and upload your data. What we at MDMP want to offer is an insight to students and staff the true energy cost of their data storage on the cloud, and the subsequent carbon output. We will then demonstrate how best to reduce the data they store, and which providers offer the lowest carbon footprint. 1.4 trillion photos are estimated to be taken in 2021, with 90.6% of them on Smartphones. This immense amount of data means that over 7.88 trillion photos are currently stored across hard drives, and cloud services. It takes approximately 7 kWh per gigabyte (approximately enough data to save a few hundred high-resolution photos or an hour of video) of data stored on the cloud, versus personal hard disk, which requires about 0.000005 kWh per gigabyte. If we are able to get all 18,000 students at Trinity to remove 1 gigabyte of data off their cloud provider, we will be able to cut 36 tones of carbon. We aim to build an app that users input their cloud habits (number of photos taken PA, Phone model, Android vs IOS, 3rd party cloud providers) and we will calculate their emission and provide ways they can store their data more efficiently, and switch to more environmentally friendly providers.

This project is envisaged to be rolled out to all participating universities and aimed to engage all members staff and students. Ultimately, it should be open to all members of the public that use cloud services.

For this project we estimate we will need approximately €600 to build a basis website, that deals solely with visual media storage on cloud services. Domain Rights €50 Web Development €200 Social Media Campaign & Branding €200 Web Hosting €150. If we wanted to expand the scope of our project to other data storage and develop an app we would seek private sector partners who would provide the funding.

As this project will be an app there is no in person engagement required for its promotion. Apart from development which may require in person meetings for the team with the necessary health measures observed, should we need to move completely online to complete the project I do not see any major issue doing so. All promotion will be done on social media and through email via TCD, should we be successful. Therefore no in person campaign needs to be conducted on campus to raise awareness.