Researchers at Imperial College London made headlines last year when they claimed that up to 200 litres of water could be involved in the download of a single gigabyte (GB) of data.

Source: BBC News

Date: October 18th, 2016

Link: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37471911

Discussion

1) “Whenever you check social media, send an email, or stream a video, you will be receiving and exchanging data with a data centre somewhere in the world – a vast server farm full of heat-producing, power-hungry computers.”  So, your data usage is contributing to global warming and wasting water.  Why will this not matter to you at all?

2) Given how you get your data bandwidth (not from Google), does it make any difference to you if Google, say, makes an effort to curb it’s cooling costs?