{"id":930906,"date":"2026-10-17T01:36:25","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T01:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/930906\/"},"modified":"2026-10-17T01:36:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T01:36:25","slug":"decluttering-your-online-life-how-to-get-your-digital-house-in-order-and-protect-your-data-from-ai-datacentres-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/930906\/","title":{"rendered":"Decluttering your online life: how to get your digital house in order and protect your data from AI | Datacentres – Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many Australians worry about datacentres<\/a> swallowing up local land and energy but we rarely look closely at our own digital trails.<\/p>\n

Our endless photo and video streams, bursting inboxes and unread subscriptions all feed the appetite for ever growing digital infrastructure. The average person spends 40% of their waking hours online \u2013 browsing the web or social media, streaming music or videos, or communicating \u2013 producing the equivalent of 229kg of carbon emissions, a study in Nature Communications<\/a> found. And using AI tools and chatbots<\/a> to generate text, images or video consumes \u201corders of magnitude\u201d<\/a> more energy than traditional computing methods.<\/p>\n

Clearing out digital clutter does more than just shrink your environmental impact \u2013 it can also provide a welcome boost to your mental health and productivity. So, why not give your devices and cloud storage a spring clean?<\/p>\n

Getting your digital house in order<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure I\u2019m not alone in experiencing the soul-crushing frustration of looking for lost files or photos online, or simply trying to get my IT working properly. An IDC study of 840 information workers<\/a> has found the average employee wastes more than two hours each week hunting for lost files and online documents.<\/p>\n

Libby Sadler, an associate professor of organisational behaviour at Bond University, says organising our digital files and devices not only prevents time being lost but also reduces the cognitive friction and drain that occurs when we aren\u2019t organised.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot being able to find things or having apps crash or run slowly because we haven\u2019t updated software also puts us in a negative mood, which isn\u2019t great for our work or life in general,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Her advice is to start simple: empty your online trash bins, unsubscribe from things you don\u2019t read and delete any apps you don\u2019t use. Another tip is make sure you have enough memory available and select a single cloud provider to store everything, rather than having your information spread across multiple platforms.<\/p>\n

Andrew Cullen, senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says it is useful to think of a digital declutter as akin to cleaning a house<\/a> \u2013 it may feel overwhelming but it\u2019s not something you have to complete all at once. \u201cMaybe you start off by just deleting all old emails from that online store you visited once. And while you\u2019re at it, consider unsubscribing too. You\u2019ll be amazed how quickly digital junk disappears if you just spend a few minutes on it every week.<\/p>\n

\u2018Emails could contain scans of your ID, or records of your job history, or a million other things we wouldn\u2019t want someone finding,\u2019 Andrew Cullen says. Photograph: MirageC\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to photos, the cloud storage providers can help you out \u2013 they have tools to find blurry photos, which are a great thing to give the flick to. But you can also just select a whole day\u2019s worth of photos and delete them too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Protecting your data from the AI tech barons<\/p>\n

At a time when AI companies are scraping available data to serve their own commercial ends, it is more vital than ever to keep our digital lives in order.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes that\u2019s books, or YouTube videos, but other times it\u2019s 10-year-old selfies from your Instagram, or things from social media accounts that we\u2019ve long since stopped using,\u201d Cullen says. \u201cWhile these may be things that you no longer value, they\u2019re valuable to AI companies and, really, anyone who wants to learn about you.\u201d<\/p>\n

When our data is floating around on phones, email servers and cloud services, it takes a proactive effort to expunge digital fluff.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn an age where so much data is being collected about us, it\u2019s important to ask both what we\u2019re holding on to things for, and who else might value that data,\u201d Cullen says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt some point, we are likely to go through old receipts and throw them out \u2026 But if you compare that to emails from an old real estate agent, it\u2019s easy to say: out of sight, out of mind. But those emails could contain scans of your ID, or records of your job history, or a million other things we wouldn\u2019t want someone finding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consider limiting AI use in the first place \u2013 by unsubscribing from AI platforms, excluding AI results from search (for example, by adding \u201c-AI\u201d to the end of a search query) and avoiding using it for unnecessary or energy-intensive tasks such as text-to-video prompts, or AI-generated images for celebrations or work presentations.<\/p>\n

Endlessly wasted data<\/p>\n

Slowly but surely, the cost of storing our data is increasing \u2013 both financially and environmentally. Popular storage platform Dropbox reported<\/a> earnings of US $2.5bn from 18 million customers in 2025, each paying $138 on average.<\/p>\n

Google Photos alone holds over 9tn photos, Cullen says. \u201cOn a service that has only been around for 11 years, that\u2019s an insane amount of photos. If we filled up phones with photos and nothing else, that\u2019s enough to fill up over 100 million phones, and is about 1% of all the data stored in all the world\u2019s datacentres.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat these companies give this away for free should really underscore the value that it brings them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadler agrees, adding that while undergoing a digital spring clean of old files, emails, photos, unused accounts and cloud storage won\u2019t solve the problem alone, it will help make us more conscious of how much digital information we create, store and keep indefinitely.<\/p>\n

\u201cAsk yourself: what do we really need to keep, what can be deleted, and what we are asking organisations to store on our behalf?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many Australians worry about datacentres swallowing up local land and energy but we rarely look closely at our…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":930907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-930906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/930907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}