3 ms·

It's nuts, isn't it? It seems pretty clear the software doesn't actually transmit the data that it accesses, for a start receiving the volumes of data supposed

• Groxx 15y ago
  Check your math. You're talking about recording the keystrokes and URLs people visit on smartphones. That adds up to such a phenomenally-small fraction of the data they actually download, storage for all 141+ million users could probably be accomplished by your average geek with a checkbook. For scale, lets assume that each user sends, oh, 100 megabytes of data over a year. Roughly equivalent to 100 million characters, or (going with a 5mb ascii version of the bible I just googled) 20 bibles worth of text, or 1 million URLs at 100 characters long (that's roughly one URL every 30 seconds), so this is likely an overestimate, possibly substantially. And they have all 141 million users for the full year. Punch in the numbers, and you get 141 terabytes of data. Without compression. That's microscopic. I can buy hard drives for that off the shelf for not too much money. Here, Backblaze sells that much for $7.4k in a single box, which is absolute pennies to a company with 141 million customers: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v... Meanwhile, Amazon has pricing tiers going into the petabytes for S3, and very likely receives far more than our theoretical 141TB in a single day. And they're not the size of the moon.