Yesterday I was thinking about the disclaimers appended to emails, oddly the one from @Media, the 832 bytes of disclaimer didn't really say anything helpful. They do not have a strong legal position which there questions their enforceability. What bothers me is not that they include the disclaimer, but the amount of data that needs to be sent, stored and probably backed up by many people.
I guess some lawyer said that it was more enforceable if it formed part of the same document and was not a link to a standard disclaimer. The plaintiff being unable to plead to not having read the disclaimer. A UK perspective, which is also generally not in favour of them.
So lets do some maths, call the average disclaimer 512 bytes to make the maths easier and underestimate the final figure. The BBC and Macmillan both append these automatically to outgoing email, as they are my former and current employers lets go with them.
512 per email times say 10,000 employees sending 200 external emails a month equals 1024,000,000 bytes of additional date or nearly 976MB of extra data sent and stored around the world. Call that 12G a year, not a lot you might think, but that is a tentative estimate for the BBC alone and we are at a gig a month already.
Data requires electricity to move about, to be stored, backups use more electricity and then energy to be moved off site. How much energy is being used in shifting just these disclaimers around the planet?
I'm certainly going to be asking my employer to review the use of them, I suggest you do the same.
Building Social Web Applications by Gavin Bell.
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