Apple paid a couple of 1.7 million dollars for their plot of land, which was only worth $181,700. While Apple was building a huge data centre in the middle of North Carolina, they wanted to occupy the area of a couple that had lived there for 34 years. When the couple refused to leave, Apple paid them 1.7 million dollars for their land.
100 Mind-Blowing Data Facts
By using big data, Wal-Mart determined that people stock up the most on strawberry Pop-Tarts and beer before a hurricane.
According to Instacart data, the growth in order share for non-alcoholic cocktails grew 666% in 2023.
Kelley Blue Book data revealed that the average price paid for a new electric vehicle (EV) in November 2023 was $52,345. Industry experts state that EV price parity is approaching as EV transaction prices in November 2023 were only 8.5% higher than the industry average price of $48,247.
Cleveland was once the country’s fifth-largest city. Data from the 1920 U.S. census indicates that Cleveland, Ohio, was one of the most heavily populated cities in the country, behind only Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City.
For every non-porn webpage, there are five porn pages. Whether that’s part of the fun facts is up to you or not, but 30% of all data transferred across the Internet is porn.
Blue is the most common favourite colour worldwide. According to data from global marketing firms, blue is the world’s most common favourite colour. It is closely followed by purple.
The CIA spent 25 million dollars on “spy cats.” In the 1960s, the CIA tried using cats to gather intel on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. They equipped cats with a batter, microphone and antenna to record data. You can guess how that turned out.
We sent out Mars Rovers (which are like robots) on missions to explore Mars collect samples and record scientific data for scientists on Earth to study. Some of these Rovers include Viking 1, Viking 2, Mars 2, Mars 3, Spirit, Phoenix, Pathfinder, Curiosity, and Opportunity.
Most people start viewing websites from the top left corner. It’s how we’ve been trained to search for data and information.
Earth isn’t round. While this sounds like an elaborate joke, we’re serious. Earth isn’t flat, but it’s not perfectly round either. Earth’s rotation causes the planet to bulge at the equator and flatten at the poles, while the distribution of mass on Earth (which is not perfectly uniform) causes small variations in the gravitational pull at different locations on the planet. These variations are too small to be seen in pictures of Earth from space, so they appear round to the human eye. The shape seen in the video above is not technically the shape of the planet, but its ‘geoid’, the shape of its mean sea-level surface extending around the entire globe. The map was produced using data collected from ESA’s Gravity and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) and shows the most detailed map ever created of Earth’s gravity field.
Earth has a squishy interior. Earth’s interior is not solid but rather has a semi-solid or ‘squishy’ consistency owing to high temperatures and pressures. This squishy consistency allows the mantle to flow and move over geological timescales, which is responsible for phenomena such as plate tectonics, volcanic activity and Earthquakes. One consequence of this squishy interior is a process known as post-glacial rebound. During the last ice age, large portions of Earth’s surface were covered by glaciers, causing the underlying mantle to deform and sink. As the glaciers melted and receded, the mantle slowly rebounded back to its original position over thousands of years, causing the land above it to rise. This process is still occurring today in places such as Canada, Scandinavia, and Greenland, where the land is still rebounding from the weight of the glaciers that once covered the region. Recent research has found that West Antarctica is rising faster than anywhere else in the world, thanks to data from ESA’s GOCE gravity mission. The study of post-glacial rebound provides important insights into the structure and behaviour of Earth’s interior, and how it responds to changes in the surface environment over long timescales.
Antarctica is home to the largest ice sheet on Earth. More than six times as large as Greenland, Antarctica is the southernmost continent and is the coldest and windiest place on Earth – with temperatures that can drop as low as -89.2°C and winds that can exceed 320 km per hour. Antarctica is home to the largest ice sheet on Earth, containing a staggering 30 million cubic kilometres of ice. This represents an incredible 70% of Earth’s freshwater and 90% of its ice. As a result, changes to the Antarctic ice sheet can have significant implications for global sea levels and ocean currents. Monitoring the Antarctic ice sheet is therefore of paramount importance and satellite data plays a crucial role in this effort. Data from satellites such as CryoSat, ESA’s ice mission, allow scientists to track changes in the thickness and movement of the ice sheet over time, providing insights into how it is responding to a changing climate. ESA has recently teamed up with NASA and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to carry out an ambitious campaign in Antarctica which involved taking simultaneous measurements of sea ice from ESA’s CryoSat and NASA’s ICESat-2 satellites. This research is essential for informing policy decisions on issues such as climate change and sea level rise, and for developing strategies to mitigate their impact on coastal communities around the world.
Earth’s magnetic pole is creeping westward. Unlike our geographic North Pole, which is in a fixed location, Earth’s magnetic north wanders. Until the early 1990s, the magnetic North Pole was known to lie some 1600 km south of true north, in Canada. Yet scientists realised that the location of the magnetic north wasn’t fixed and was drifting at a rate of 15 km a year. Since the 1990s, however, the drift of Earth’s magnetic pole has turned into more of a sprint. Its present speed is around 50-60 km a year and is making a dash towards Siberia at a pace not seen before. Why? Scientists studying the drift of Earth’s magnetic north pole, using data from ESA’s Swarm mission, have pinpointed a change in the circulation pattern of magnetic blobs deep below Earth’s surface. They learned a change in the flow underneath Canada has caused a patch of magnetic field at the edge of Earth’s core, deep within the Earth, to be stretched out. This has weakened the Canadian patch and resulted in the pole shifting towards Siberia.
Europe is the second smallest continent in size but the third largest in population. Europe is known for its diverse cultures, rich history and stunning landmarks. Despite being the second smallest continent in size (after Australia), Europe is home to a staggering population of over 746 million people, making it the third largest continent in terms of population (after Asia and Africa). Europe has one of the highest levels of urbanisation in the world, with over 75% of its population living in urban areas. With the world’s population expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050, we must increase efforts to understand and mitigate the challenges brought by rapid and unplanned urbanisation, air pollution, as well as issues related to the management of water and energy. ESA and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), in collaboration with the Google Earth Engine team, have developed the World Settlement Footprint – the world’s most comprehensive dataset on human settlement. Featuring data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions, this unprecedented collection of data on human settlement will advance our understanding of urbanisation on a global scale.
The doctor who claimed there was a link between autism and vaccines created fraudulent data for his study and lost his medical license.
Recessions may not be good for our finances, but it turns out that they’re good for our health. Researchers in the US initially studied data from previous economic crises expecting to find a correlation between mortalities and economic crises. What they found was surprising, as harder times seemed actually to reduce mortality rates instead of increasing them. This is because during a recession, there is less traffic, and cleaner air, and people have less money to spend on unhealthy things like drinking alcohol or smoking.
Wikipedia is run and maintained by thousands of humans and hundreds of bots. Everyone knows Wikipedia is powered by thousands of human contributors. On the other hand, most people don’t realize hundreds of bots contribute to the effort, too. ClueBot NG catches vandalism on Wikipedia pages almost in real-time. A variety of other bots contribute standardised data to the online encyclopedia. This combination of humans and bots ensures Wikipedia runs without any problems 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
This Is The World’s Largest Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Seagate launched the Exos 20+ hard disk drive (HDD) in December 2020. The HDD utilises HAMR and MACH2 technologies to offer 20 terabytes (TB) of storage. Typically, home computers utilise hard drives ranging from 1TB to 4 TB. Businesses and data centres may use significantly larger hard drives. It’s an impressive development from Seagate. The company recently launched 18TB hard drives to the market as well. Lately, companies have released larger and larger hard drives with improved performance. Solid state drives (SSDs) continue to grow in popularity, but the HDD remains a competitive alternative, especially for larger capacities.
Amazon Alexa stores your conversations with the device. By now, millions of households feature an Amazon Echo device or other Amazon smart devices based on Alexa. These smart assistants provide convenience and functionality in countless ways. Not everyone realizes these devices store conversations with the device in the cloud, though. After each interaction, Amazon stores these conversations in the cloud indefinitely. An Echo device doesn’t record every conversation in the Ether. Each Echo relies on a wake word, like “Alexa”, to start recording conversations. Only the commands spoken to the device are stored by Amazon and are used purely to make the AI better. Users can and should delete these conversations in their device settings from time to time. Doing so provides added security and protection from data hackers.
How much digital data has been created so far in the world? In 2018, the Global Datasphere amounted to 33 Zettabytes of data. Nearly 60% of that data was stored on traditional hard drives. IDC predicts the Datasphere will explode to 175 Zettabytes by 2025. Cloud storage continues to lead growth in data storage solutions as time goes on. By 2025, nearly 50% of the world’s data may exist in the cloud. China should soon become the country with the most cumulative data. Growth in the country is expected to outpace the rest of the world by 30%. As time goes on, cumulative data storage should continue to explode in growth around the world.
A Petabyte is a lot of data. We all know 1 GB is the same as 1024 MB, but did you know that 1 petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1024 terabytes (TB)? To give an example of how big this is, a 1 PB hard drive could hold 13.3 years of HD-TV video. A 50 PB hard drive could hold the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.
Megabytes used to weigh hundreds of pounds. More specifically, 5 megabytes of data weighed one ton. In 1956, the first computer had something similar to a hard drive. At the time, it was a huge leap in storage capabilities, but the cabinet that contained the hard drive weighed over 2,200 pounds and could hold 5 MBs of data.
Computer Security Day is celebrated on November 30th. It was started in 1988 to help raise awareness of computer-related security issues. To celebrate Computer Security Day is easy and important – check your privacy settings on Facebook, and change your passwords to something stronger. You can also read the latest technology facts and make sure your data stored on your phone or in the cloud is secure.
90% of the world’s data was generated between 2019 and the present.
91.6% of Fortune 1000 companies have plans to invest more in big data and AI initiatives.
Data centres brought in $228.4 billion in 2021.
In 2014, Sony made a cassette tape that can store 185TB of data!
100 Million Americans Relied on Microsoft Defender in 2022. In 2021, Microsoft Defender had 80 million US users. However, the number increased by over 20 million, reaching 100+ million, according to 2022 data. The significant spike may be attributed to increased Windows 11 use and Microsoft Defender improvements.
Over 95% of Linux is written in C language, according to data crunched by the openhub.net website.
Linux is written over 95% in C language, according to data from the https://openhub.net website.
The average cost of a data breach was $4.88 million in 2024, the highest average on record. (IBM)
64 per cent of Americans have never checked to see if they were affected by a data breach. (Varonis)
56 per cent of Americans don’t know what steps to take in the event of a data breach. (Varonis)
A 2021 LinkedIn data breach exposed the personal information of 700 million users or about 93 percent of all LinkedIn members. (RestorePrivacy)
In 2023 T-Mobile disclosed its second data breach of the year involving the theft of 836 customers’ data, the first data breach affected approximately 37 million customers. (itgovernanace)
In September 2021, Neiman Marcus found an 18-month-old data breach that exposed payment data and other information for 4.6 million shoppers. (Neiman Marcus)
Personal data belonging to more than 100 million Android users was exposed in a 2021 data leak due to misconfigured cloud services. (Check Point)
Trading app Robinhood fell victim to a social engineering attack that compromised the personal data of 5 million users. (Robinhood)
500 million consumers, dating back to 2014, had their information compromised in the Marriott-Starwood data breach made public in 2018. (CSO Online)
The 2019 MGM data breach resulted in hackers leaking records of 142 million hotel guests. (CPO Magazine)
Uber tried to pay off hackers to delete the stolen data of 57 million users and keep the breach quiet. (Bloomberg)
Only eight per cent of businesses that pay ransom to hackers receive all of their data in return. (Sophos)
19 per cent of data breaches involve internal actors. (Verizon)
So far, data breaches exposed 7 billion records in the first half of 2024. (IT Governance)
In the GDPR’s first year, there were 144,000 complaints filed with various GDPR enforcement agencies and 89,000 data breaches recorded. (EDPB)
In 2023 TikTok was fined for breaching several GDPR rules, including failure to keep children’s data safe. (Tech Crunch)
The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is $4.88 million, a 10 per cent increase over last year. (IBM)
The average per-capita cost of a data breach is $165, one dollar higher than in 2022. (IBM)
When remote work is a factor in causing a data breach, the average cost per breach is $173,074 higher. (IBM)
A data breach can cost a company an average of $1.3 million in lost business. (IBM)
Since 2020, healthcare data breach costs have increased 53.3%. (IBM)
The average total cost of a data breach in smaller companies (500 employees or less) increased from $2.92 million in 2022 to $3.31 million in 2022. (IBM)
Data breaches led to an increase in the pricing of business offerings for 57% of companies. (IBM)
The average total cost of a data breach in Canada decreased by 9 per cent from $5.64 million to $5.13 million (IBM)
In 2024, the United States is the country with the highest average total cost of a data breach at $9.36 million. The Middle East is a close second with $8.75 million (IBM).
In 2023 a data breach investigation report stated that 97 percent of threat actors were financially motivated. (Verizon)
32 per cent of all recorded data breaches between 2015 and 2022 were in the healthcare industry. (HIPAA Journal)
Financial services businesses take an average of 233 days to detect and contain a data breach. (Varonis)
The average cost of a financial services data breach is $4.45 million. (IBM)
Confirmed data breaches in the healthcare industry increased by 58 per cent during the pandemic. (Verizon)
33,000 unemployment applicants were exposed to a data security breach from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program in May. (NBC)
Cybercrime costs the world economy more than $1 trillion per year (McAfee): McAfee believes the cost of cybercrime around the world is around $1 trillion per year, accounting for around 1% of our total GDP. The costs of cybercrime are often influenced by several factors of course, including the degree of damage caused, the theft of certain property (intellectual or otherwise), and the costs of stolen money. When companies lose data, there are hours of work put into fixing the problem.
The most expensive part of a hack is the lost information (Accenture): According to Accenture’s report on the costs of cybercrime, the most expensive component of any breach is a loss of information. The los of information costs around $5.9 million, Accenture notes. What’s more, the number of hacking attacks focused on targeting specific people or personal data is increasing. Malware and web-based hacking have increased significantly in recent years. RiskBased Security found in 2020, data breaches exposed around 36 billion records in the first half of the year – double the number of records exposed in all of 2019.
The Average cost of a data breach is around $3.86 million (IBM): According to IBM, the average cost of a breach in data is around $3.68 million as of 2020. In 2021, this cost accelerated to $3.61 million in hybrid cloud environments. What makes the costs of data breaches even greater is that the average time to identify a breach is often around 287 days. The average cost of a ransomware breach was around $4.62 million in 2021 according to IBM, and healthcare suffered the worst, with the highest total cost for a data breach according to industry.
White Hat Hackers Earning Significant Incomes (HackerOne): According to HackerOne, not all hackers are necessarily criminals. White hat hackers, the people responsible for checking the quality of security and data protection strategies for businesses, are helping companies reduce their risk status. The white hat hackers working within HackerOne in 2019 earned around $40 million in bounties. Even more impressive, there were around 6 hackers on the platform who earned more than $1 million in lifetime earnings by attempting to hack companies.
46% of organisations received malware via email in 2020 (Verizon): Hacking strategies can take place in a range of environments. According to Verizon’s annual data breach investigation, around 46% of organisations received malware intended to give hackers access to their servers through email. 96% of social actions were also delivered by email, whereas only 3% were delivered through a website.
Credentials are the most sought-after data in a hack (Verizon): Verizon’s report for 2021 on data security found that credentials are still one of the most sought-after data types, followed by personal data like social security numbers, names, and addresses. This demonstrates the importance of users protecting their own data and business data when using digital assets. IBM’s data report for 2021 also found hackers to be in search of personal details. The most common records compromised in this report were customer PII and anonymized customer data.
Remote working may be causing increased hacking issues (IBM): According to IBM and the Ponemon Institute, there’s been a 10% increase in the average total cost of data breaches between 2020 and 2021. Remote working and digital transformation caused by the pandemic of 2020 increased the average cost of a data breach by around $1.07 million. During the pandemic, IBM notes customer PII was the most common type of record lost, included in around 44% of breaches, and each record was worth around $180.
More than 85% of breaches in 2021 involved a human element (Verizon): The Verizon Data Breach Investigations report for 2021 found around 85% of breaches involved a human element, and 61% involved using an employee’s credentials stolen from the business. In 2021, the majority of attacks came from social engineering, phishing, and Denial of Service attacks, according to Verizon. Particularly, Phishing became one of the most significant threats during the pandemic.
53% of users haven’t changed their password in the last year (LastPass): Despite numerous reports in the last couple of years highlighting the impact of a poor password on data security and hacking issues, 53% of users worldwide haven’t changed their password in a year. 42% of customers say they believe a password should be easier to remember, rather than secure. 80% of users in this study said they’d be concerned if their password was compromised, but 48% wouldn’t change their password if it wasn’t required. When asked where they’d be tempted to create strong passwords, 69% of users said they would do so for financial accounts, and only 29% said they would create a strong password for work-related accounts.
Edward Snowden Leaks: In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified information about NSA surveillance programs, including PRISM and metadata collection, which revealed extensive data collection from U.S. Internet service providers and cellular phone calls.
PRISM Program: The PRISM program collected information from U.S. Internet service providers, targeting non-Americans but also collecting data from Americans with whom those individuals had communicated.
Billions of funds are transferred each year: In 2021, money transfers to low and middle-income countries reached US $605 billion according to the latest World Bank data. It’s estimated that around one billion people worldwide (or 1 in 7 people) are involved in international money transfers, with around 200 million migrant workers sending money back home and 800 million people receiving it.
There is no exact historical data, but many experts are inclined to believe that the word “money” comes from the Turkic designation of coins “tenge”. The “penny” got its name during the time of Ivan the Terrible, when they issued money with the image of a horseman with a spear in his hand.
The chatbot was trained on a massive corpus of text data, around 570GB of datasets, including web pages, books, and other sources.
ChatGPT free includes unlimited messages, interactions, and history. ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per user billed monthly and adds access to additional tools like DALL·E, Browsing, Advanced Data Analysis, and more.
ChatGPT’s knowledge is limited to its training data, which has a cutoff of January 2022.
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the spending on AI will reach $22 billion in 2022 across Europe. The number is expected to surpass $50 billion by 2025.
As reported by Gartner, by 2025, more than 75% of venture and seed capital investors will use AI and data analytics to gather information.
Low-code or no-code AI is a big trend in 2022 that would pave the way for the “ongoing ‘democratization’ of AI and data technology.” This means that people could customise AI with only written or voice instructions that don’t require complex technical knowledge.
Voice search has made SEO much more complicated as users get only one result from a single data source.
Because of concerns over data privacy, the EU has created a draft of ethics guidelines for AI. It outlines points like how developers should ensure that their AI will respect fundamental human rights.
AI can help predict natural disasters. AI algorithms can analyse weather patterns and other data to predict natural disasters such as hurricanes and Earthquakes.
AI is being used in space exploration. AI is being used to analyse data from space missions and make decisions about how to proceed, potentially leading to discoveries and breakthroughs.