On the more heroic end of the screenshot's legal history sits one of the internet's most impressive examples of crowdsourced detective work. A violent incident in Philadelphia had gone cold when video footage of the suspects surfaced online. A Twitter user took screenshots of the suspects' faces and clothing from the clip and began cross-referencing them with publicly available information.
He identified a restaurant visible in the background of the video, matched it to a specific Philadelphia location called La Viola using Facebook check-ins, and then found a public photo uploaded by a group dining there at the exact same time, which showed the suspects in identical clothing.
The screenshots were handed to police and the suspects turned themselves in shortly after. The screenshot that started as a gossip tool and evolved into a legal liability became, in this instance, a genuine instrument of justice. It contains multitudes.
But don't be so quick to brag about your screenshot collection. Data centres consume an estimated 200 terawatt-hours of electricity every single year. The carbon footprint of all that digital storage is roughly equivalent to the entire commercial airline industry. Every screenshot you have ever taken and never looked at again is sitting on a server somewhere, drawing power, contributing to emissions.
The scale of what researchers call "dark data" makes this significantly worse. More than 50% of all data stored by individuals and companies is captured once, processed once, and then never accessed again. It just sits there, in server farms running around the clock, consuming electricity to remain instantly available for a retrieval that is never going to happen.
Academic research has found that 60% of people never delete photos or screenshots from their phones. The path from "I'll deal with this later" to "contributing to global carbon emissions" is, it turns out, extremely short and requires almost no effort whatsoever.
The screenshots in this article exist because people captured moments they wanted to preserve, share, or simply couldn't believe were real. Most of them should probably have stayed in the drafts. A significant number of them are currently sitting in a cloud server, drawing power for no reason. So go delete some of your digital clutter so we can have more space for funny screenshots without making the planet cry, please?
How many unused screenshots do you estimate you have in your camera roll? Take a guess in the comments!
