Think about the websites, platforms and software that you use every day. There are loads of them aren’t there? How many of them are you using because you’ve made an explicit choice to use them and how many represent the default?
Social media is a great example. Many people joined platforms as they first came online and have never left. Service levels might have degraded. You might see less updates from your friends and family than before. Maybe the more you find out about the founder’s personal politics, the ickier you feel about remaining. Even so, it’s hard to leave because you’ve got sunk time costs invested there. You still have contacts and communities it’s worth keeping in touch with.
What does it matter if you remain?
Millions of other users are still there too.
One more active account can’t hurt, can it?
I’ve been pondering this issue a lot recently. I’m a digital native, working for a web development agency, I spend a lot of time online using tools, websites and software. Even so I’ve begun to question where and how I spend my time online. It might sound paranoid but I also question who else benefits from what I’m doing. Finally, as you might expect from a Wholegrainer, I’m keen to make sure that I’m minimising the environmental harm my digital activities cause.
What I’m increasingly realising is that the default and most popular options we use online are rarely the best. Not for the user and not for the planet.
In this series of articles I’m going to explore how we do things online, what hidden issues this might cause and importantly, how to do things better, for people and planet.
I’ll kick things off by exploring what you’re reading this article on right now. A web browser.
Is the browser you are using exploiting your privacy, using excess energy and harming the planet?
There is a pretty good chance you’re using Chrome so statistically the answer is probably yes. At the time of publication Chrome accounts for two thirds (66.3%) of all browser usage on the net. Safari trails behind at about 18% of market share.
Why is this an issue?
Chrome is a big reason that ad profiling is so successful for Google.Google offers many free services but makes the majority of its revenue through advertising and user profiling for ad targeting. Chrome is a big reason that they are so effective at this. It allows themGoogle to create a unique “browser fingerprint” of your device. This is your digital doppelganger when you browse using Chrome.
It takes a set of characteristics from your device and uses them to create a unique picture of you and your habits. Using this data they can more accurately target you with online ads and allow other companies to do the same.
This requires data. Lots and lots of data.
By some estimates, Google stores an additional 15 Petabytes of data every day. If 15 petabyte doesn’t sound like much, remember that 1 petabyte is equivalent to:
- 500 billion pages of standard printed text
- or 200 million 5mb photos
- or 13.3 years worth of HD video content
That amount of data, multiplied by 15, every, single, day.
Don’t worry though, Google won’t run out of storage any time soon. They have an estimated 30 zettabytes (30 trillion gigabytes) of capacity in their (power, water and resource hungry) data centres.
Not all of this data is from browsing. But there are 5.56 billion people online and going by the browser market share above 3.67 billion of them use Chrome. It’s a pretty safe bet that there is a sizable stream of data flowing into hyperscale data centres around the world.
What’s the data used for?
User data is vital for online advertisers and data brokers to make a profit. We know social media platforms like Meta collect this data absolutely ruthlessly. We know that websites often do it using cookies or tracking scripts. Big tech is engaged in an online arms race to get identifiable user data and profiles.
Google gets a lot of this user data via Chrome. The fingerprint it creates combines a range of data points gleaned from your browsing.
These include things like:
- IP address (or use of VPN)
- Device information like processor and operating system
- Device settings and preferences
- Screen resolution
- Installed fonts and much, much more
Individually none of these data points are that important. But combined, collated and compared with billions of other users’ devices, habits and behaviours, it’s incredibly powerful.
Why is this bad?
The neo-luddite in me is very glad you asked. It erodes our personal privacy. It encourages consumption our planet can’t afford and it increases the web’s energy and resource use. Let’s dig into those areas.
Privacy
Even though, like Chrome, Google services are often free, they are costing us some measure of our privacy. A company serving you online ads doesn’t know your name, but it knows an awful lot about you. It probably knows things that you wouldn’t want other people to know. These might be fairly innocent but intensely private things such as a medical issue you may have researched. They might be totally inconsequential. In the end it doesn’t matter. We all have a right to privacy, which is less respected by companies like Google than we realise.
Consumption
The laser focussed targeting of users with ads encourages a level of consumption that our planet can’t cope with. Humanity consumes vastly more resources than the earth has the bio-capacity to regenerate. To combat the climate crisis, the developed world needs to consume less. Being exposed to fewer and less effective adverts would likely help reduce consumption. It would be healthier on our bank balances, psyches and eco-systems.
Damaging data centres
From a digital sustainability point of view, this data gathering represents a crisis of its own. Data centre growth has exploded in recent years. This is caused partly by generative AI and partly by surveillance capitalism and data gathering. These huge data centres need power, water, space, minerals and resources.
The creation of individual digital shadows from our online habits impacts us in the real world. The move to renewables is being impacted by the increased demands of big tech. Living close to data centres can be hell, with issues like noise pollution and strain on water supplies. We need data centres but not in the numbers that exist presently.
Want a more privacy focussed and lower energy browsing experience?
There is one fairly simple step you can take to combat this. Reduce your use of Chrome by choosing a more privacy focussed browser. There are a number of options to do this including Brave, Vivaldi and my suggestion, Firefox.
Firefox currently only accounts for around 2.6% of browser market share. This is a real shame because there’s a lot to like about it. No browser is perfect of course but Firefox is pretty good and extremely customisable.
Here are five ways that using it are better, right out of the box.
- It’s owned and maintained by a not for profit committed to building a fairer, safer internet. They want an internet “where our privacy is protected, AI is trustworthy and irresponsible tech companies are held accountable.” That sounds quite nice doesn’t it?
Here’s their full Manifesto. - It’s a privacy first browser. It blocks trackers from the first time you install it by default. It also allows you to further enhance your online privacy if you wish. By contrast, Chrome tracks your browsing even in incognito windows.
- Using Firefox means less data is collected and stored as you browse. This means less demand for data centres and less energy is required for your online actions.
- Not only are you saving energy use at a data centre level, you are doing so at a device level too. Tests show that Firefox uses less electricity than Chrome, meaning lower browsing emissions.
- Firefox is an open source project. This means that its source code can be scrutinised and improved by its users. A transparent and collaborative web is better and fairer for its users.
As I say, it’s not perfect. The privacy features can mean that some features of a website don’t work as the developers intended but you can always set exceptions where this is the case.
Just remember that the exceptions you set means you are sacrificing some level of your online privacy. You are more in control of these choices with Firefox than with Chrome. The number of times you end up doing this might just surprise you too.
What if you really, really can’t give up using Chrome as your main browser?
Those sunk costs I mentioned in the introduction can seem insurmountable. Moving to Firefox or another more privacy focussed browser won’t feel the same as using Chrome. The usability and familiarity you get on Chrome comes in part from all the data it gathers about you and your browsing habits.
It is possible to reduce the amount of data Chrome collects and retains on you. There are guides like this one from Wired that will help you do it. It’s likely that even with adjusted settings you won’t get the same level of privacy as you would with an alternative. You might also find that the new browsing experience is compromised by the changes you make. Again, this will give you an insight into how and how often your data is gathered as you browse.
Whatever steps you take, remember:
You’re in control of how you browse and interact online
The key thing to take away from this article and subsequent ones, is that you have the right and ability to exercise control over how browse the web. We have more agency that we realise. We might not have considered what Chrome does when we chose it as our default browser but we’re not wedded to it. We don’t have to use a surveillance capitalists’ ideal browser.
There are alternatives.
Let’s explore them and use them together.