Description
Advertisements are everywhere on the Web: search engines promote results, most websites display ads, some require users to accept ads as a condition for access, video streaming services fund their infrastructure through an increasing volume of ads, and much of the gaming industry has adopted ad-based revenue models. In exchange for free access to a wide range of content, web users sacrifice their privacy and pay with personal data to enable targeted marketing, a trade-off widely studied in literature. I argue that the ad ecosystem imposes an additional, overlooked, cost on web users: energy consumption. In this presentation, I will show how browser automation can help measure the energy impact of the ad and tracking ecosystem. I will then discuss the implications of these findings and outline future work on the relationship between privacy and energy consumption.