10/30/2023 0 Comments Most visited websites![]() Sadly, we do not have access to this data and the companies do not provide it, with which the environmental impact of these processes is absolutely opaque and impossible to regulate”. ![]() The collection of data in the user's browser through cookies is only a minuscule percentage compared to the algorithmic data management necessary for the online advertising industry to function. The online advertising industry is the main business model for the Internet and for large companies in the IT sector, such as Google or Facebook. Joana Moll, responsible of the project: “These numbers, although they seem small compared to other industries, represent only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger ecosystem. This number reflects browser-based cookie traffic and does not include other application tracking activities, so this number is estimated to be much higher. This is the equivalent of the monthly emission of a Spanish city of about 28,000 inhabitants. Finally, they converted this energy estimate into its CO 2 emissions equivalent.Īnd these are the data: the research has identified more than 21 million cookies per unique visit to all these websites, belonging to more than 1,200 different companies, which means an average of 197 billion cookies per month, which translates in approximately 11,440 metric tons of CO 2 emissions per month. They calculated the electricity it costs to move these cookies over the Internet from servers to users' devices, taking into account the number of people who visit each of these sites per month, and estimated the global energy cost of telecommunications. ![]() Fernando Cucchietti and Patricio Reyes, researchers from the Data pre and post processing group, used an automatic browser to access all these pages and accept all cookies. The BSC has recorded and analyzed the data obtained after accessing the million most visited websites in the world. Analysis of the cookies of the million most visited websites in the world And it is that elements such as cookies are energy consumers and therefore have an ecological and economic cost for the user. The artist and researcher Joana Moll is responsible for Carbolytics and aims to draw attention to the social but also environmental costs of the data collection carried out by these corporations. This is the collection of data about users' online activities, such as reading news, purchasing items, interacting on social media or simply doing an online research. Tracking and recording users’ behavior has become a major business model in the last decade. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) participates in the Carbolytics project, which seeks to investigate the ecological footprint of the ecosystem of advertising technology (AdTech for its acronym in English), of which the best known are advertising cookies.
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