Have you ever been curious to know what your web activity looks like from a macro perspective? Each day, we spend more and more time connected on the web - browsing, using applications, social media, etc. Have you ever stopped to consider how much time and how much of your identity is on the web?
Consider this, on any given day, the Bethel community consumes (downloads) about 12TB of data on the web. It’s estimated that 85,899,345 pages of Word documents would fill one terabyte. Another comparison is that one terabyte is approximately 17,000 hours of music! So, on any given day we’re downloading the equivalent of 204,000 hours of music!
So, what do we spend our time on that’s equal to that much data? Well, here are the top 10 applications (from a web traffic perspective) over the last 30 days:
QUIC is basically the Chrome browser (and Firefox), and the rest are pretty self-explanatory. The data above is all in KB (so for example, 14TB of data was streamed from Netflix over the past 30 days).
What devices use all that data you may ask? Well, the most popular operating system on campus is Mac OS. That’s followed by iOS, Android and finally Windows devices. The one exception, which sits in the middle of all of those, are gaming consoles. The are the second highest used platform on campus, after Macs.
How does this relate to security? Well, we all have accounts we no longer use, but some apps and websites make deleting your profile a pain. In those cases, simply ignoring them is an easier option. However, unused accounts are a major security threat—all it takes is one successful data breach or credential-stuffing attack to potentially compromise your personal data, financial information, or private files. With how much we are all online, taking some time to eliminate old accounts is a great security measure and can help minimize your exposure. Services like Mine, can be great resources for taking back ownership of your online data. Other avenues include checking your commonly used usernames at checkusernames.com, knowem.com, namecheck.com, and usersearch.org (for looking up your old usernames).