Purpose: To participate in Digital Cleanup Day and encourage CATs to clean up unused digital files and reduce their digital footprint.

🗑️ Cleanup actions

Ideas

• Personal

  • Cleaning up personal file, photo, email storage

  • Cleaning up old work files & data

  • Deactivating or deleting social media accounts

  • Unsubscribing from digital subscriptions

  • Unsubscribing from newsletters

  • Ways / tools to remove your email from spam lists

• Work

  • Deleting duplicate or old data

  • Marketers: Clean up your lists

  • https://www.digitalcleanupday.org/participate/organizations

Getting started

• Start by choosing your focus area (see cleanup action ideas for inspiration)

• Set concrete goals: what or how much do you want to cleanup by when?

• Reflect on why deleting data is difficult for you (add to the Challenges & Obstacles list below) and what helps you tackle cleanups (add to the Motivations & Helpers list below)

• Join the CAT Digital Cleanup event on March 14, 2025

• Share wins and challenges with the CAT community in the #3-questions-and-ideas channel

  • Can you share how much MB or GB of storage did you free?

Challenges & Obstacles

What do you struggle with when it comes to digital cleanup? What makes digital cleanup difficult for you?

• Takes a long time: there are tools to automate the cleanup, but trust is a concern.

• FOMO (especially with newsletters)

• Digital hoarding – “just in case” saving

• Deleting work data is even more difficult

• Some companies like Facebook make it difficult to delete data and accounts, even using dark patterns.

Motivations & Helpers

What motivates you to take this action and tackle cleanups? Who can you turn to for help and support?

• The satisfaction of having an organised system.

• Saving money.

• Doing it with friends.

• Vision for sustainable tech.

• Cleanups also help protect privacy.

• Can feel freeing to let go of things.

🗓️ Digital Cleanup Event

• Friday, March 14 @ 5 PM CET / 4 PM UK / 12 PM ET / 9 AM PT

• RSVP: https://lu.ma/2iigtwdj

• Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85059468843?pwd=jIIz9uxqZ0QPtakq1BnQ6pzCgJ9RQM.1

Agenda

• Welcome — what is CAT?

• Share Outline page with participants

• Round robin — what is your goal for this session?

• Cleanup: Breakouts for people who want to work on something similar (depends on number of people)

• Return from breakout

  • Share out what you did, what were the challenges, what will you do next

📝 Event notes

Space for community notes — please add resources, thoughts, etc. here

Discussion

• Set goals by count or size

  • Remove 500 photos

  • Unsubscribe from 5 or more newsletters

  • Remove 25 GB of outdated files

  • Uninstall 10+ app on my phone

• Google photos tip:

  • Search for a topic (like “sky” or “tree” or “building”), and delete the extras

  • Go to Storage > Review and delete to delete blurry photos, videos/images from other apps, etc

  • Lots of us struggle with large photo libraries in the cloud.

  • Set specific targets (e.g., try to delete 500 photos in one hour).

  • Look through your vacation photos, chances are you took 2-3 duplicate photos of the same visual souvenir 😅 you only need 1!

    Example:

    

  • In Settings, select the option of “Storage saver” to keep the photos at slightly reduced quality.

    

  • To stop google photos from running unnecessary scripts such as memories:

    • Go to google photos

    • Go to settings

    • In Memories:

      • Remove all the memories that google will automatically generate for you.

        

• Social media settings

  • To reduce data on twitter:

    • Go to settings and privacy

    • Go to Accessibility, display and langauges

    • Go to Display and sound

    • Disable Media previews

  • To reduce data on Linkedin:

    • Go to Account preferences

    • Disable Autoplay videos

    • Disable Sound effects

      

• Email cleanup

  • Unsubscribe from newsletters

    • Keep notes on newsletters you unsubscribed from to avoid fear of missing out

    • Gmail: ~Workaround by selecting emails and select Report Spam, but it prompts you before labelling as spam whether you’d like to unsubscribe instead. It’s not foolproof, but it sometimes works

      

  • Set rules to automatically delete newsletters/marketing emails after X months

  • It helps if you sort emails into folders with specific rules

  • Remove spam email

  • In gmail, you can filter for attachments greater than X size, for you to remove.

  • ❓ Is there a way to ‘detach’ attachments from e-mails?

    • e.g. Keep the email as a record of correspondence, but delete the files attached to them

  • ❓ Is there a way to move/export e-mails out of an account (without forwarding)?

  • search for “do not reply” emails

  • You can use a tool such as Clean Fox https://www.cleanfox.io/

    • ❓ How do you whether to trust these tools with your data and permissions?

• Phone cleanup

  • Uninstall apps

  • Delete photos

  • Move files to physical drive or personal computer

  • Change iMessage history retention period from Forever to 1 year (https://lifehacker.com/how-to-keep-imessage-from-filling-up-your-iphone-and-ic-1848450762)

Recap

• Lots of tips shared — mostly on emails & photos

• Even deleting one photo is a success, record your wins, share them with others!

• Joscha: Google has a data retention tool — have a “due date” on your files.

  • When there isn’t a data retention policy, there’s a tool that scrapes files that haven’t been used in 90 days — recommends what to delete

• Make friends with your admin team & 3rd party providers. “Data hygiene principles”

Resources

• Cutting the carbon footprint of enterprise data storage (Blancco)

  • “the digital transition has also increased the amount of redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data in internal systems.“

• Seagate’s ‘Rethink Data’ Report Reveals That 68% Of Data Available To Businesses Goes Unleveraged

  • Full PDF Report (2020)

• How Much Data Is Too Much for Organizations to Derive Value? (Information Week)

Eugene’s presentation: Reduce the amount of data in your browser

• Use a fork of Firefox to block Browser Telemetry —> Librewolf, Zen, Fennec (for phone)

  • Firefox lets you install extensions on the phone

  • Vivaldi is a Chromium-based option

• Automatic cookie cleanup

• Block scripts and trackers

  • https://noscript.net/

  • https://privacybadger.org

• Ads

  • uBlock Origin: https://ublockorigin.com/

  • Block list: Block known domains for data collection. Stop traffic. github - hagezi/dns-blocklists

    • Download pro-plus compressed

• Privacy = ecologically friendly

🏆 Celebrate your cleanup wins

• The event helped me unsubscribe from almost ten newsletters and deleting the emails from which I unsubscribed. Starting a list of unsubscribed newsletters will help me let go of even more emails that tend to go unread.

📝 Organizer notes

Async participation & promotion:

• Contribute ideas to Outline page

• Share information about the environmental impact of storage & data — share out digital waste facts: https://www.digitalcleanupday.org/

• Come to the event with some cleanup you want to do during the hour

Slack prompts

Run of show

Luma event description

Join us for a Digital Cleanup — declutter your digital life & reduce your carbon footprint! We’re ClimateAction.tech (CAT), a community of tech workers who want to use our skills to take and accelerate climate action.

According to Digital Cleanup Day, 90% of all data is never accessed 3 months after it is stored, which creates millions of tons of CO2 emissions and e-waste.

During the event, you’ll have the opportunity to work on a digital cleanup action of your choice together with other participants. For ideas on what cleanup action to take, see the list below.

Cleanup action ideas

• Cleaning up personal file, photo, email storage

• Cleaning up old work files & data

• Deactivating or deleting social media accounts

• Unsubscribing from digital subscriptions

• Unsubscribing from newsletters

• For more ideas, see: CAT Digital Cleanup Outline page

If you’re a member of CAT, you can log in to Outline with your CAT Slack account and contribute your ideas.

You can find additional Digital Cleanup resources on the Digital Cleanup Day website (not affiliated with CAT).

The event is part of the CAT March Community Action challenge focused on digital cleaup. We also invite you to start and join discussions about digital cleanup in the CAT Slack. If you’re not a CAT member yet, you can join here.