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How personalised ads are contributing to climate change

A new report from Global Action Plan analysing the scale of unnecessary emissions being generated by Big Tech’s business model has uncovered just how energy intensive it really is.

Recently, it’s become all but impossible to use social media without being constantly bombarded with ads.

And while online marketing is nothing new, you may have begun noticing that whenever you open up your favourite apps these days, the products being pushed onto you are scarily in line with your actual interests.

This is known as ‘surveillance capitalism,’ whereby companies pull together data on us from a myriad of sources to make a far more targeted bid.

It operates by algorithmically profiling users – monitoring, processing, and predicting our digital lives to coerce us into splashing the cash on items we weren’t even tempted by in the first place.

I mean, how often do you mention something in passing only for it to appear several minutes later on your Insta stories?

As familiar as you might be with this increasingly common (and considerably irritating) method of persuading us to buy things, however, you likely aren’t aware of it’s impact on the environment.

Let's Talk About Why Personalized Ads Matter | Meta

Besides, of course, the obvious role it plays in turbocharging unnecessary consumerism, which last year added an extra 32% to the annual carbon footprint of all UK citizens alone through the greenhouse gas emissions that result from the dramatic uplift in sales generated by it.

According to a report from Global Action Plan, Big Tech’s ‘toxic’ business model is extremely energy intensive.

To put into perspective just how power-hungry the mechanisms behind personalised advertisements really are, an estimated one per cent of total energy consumption on Earth is used solely to serve them, most of which is effectively wasted due to the complex auction system that goes on in the background.

As cybersecurity and ad fraud researcher Dr Augustine Fou explains, each time we click on a webpage, we trigger a chain of real-time bidding (RTB) as brands compete to show us what they’ve got on offer.

178 trillion RTB transactions occur annually in Europe and the US, processed through data centres that use around 200 terawatt hours of energy every year – more than the entire national energy consumption of a medium-sized country.

‘99.999% of the bandwidth and compute power used in RTB does not result in the serving of an ad impression,’ says Fou.

Online adverts estimated to use as much energy as a small country | New Scientist

‘When you account for bot activity and ad fraud, 100% of those ads are not shown to humans so 100% of that activity is wasting energy and generating CO2 emissions without producing a useful outcome.’

In this regard, Global Action Plan argues that Big Tech billionaires are the ‘oil barons of the 21st century’ and that their exponentially growing contribution to the climate crisis is making it harder for the rest of the world to take crucial action.

Urging activists to turn their attention to this multidimensional problem, the charity is focused on exposing the industry as a foundational blocker to meaningful change so that we can start holding the necessary people accountable.

‘Big Tech’s way of doing business is fundamentally at odds with efforts to stave off the deepening climate crisis. These platforms and their eye-watering profits rely on processing massive quantities of data at a huge direct carbon cost,’ says policy and campaigns lead, Oliver Hayes.

He references Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, which now have higher market valuations than the entire fossil fuel sector in America.

‘This is inseparable from the incentives of an online advertising industry which is built on surveillance and compulsive attention. These incentives accelerate consumerism, but they also pollute our information environment in ways that are even more devastating to effective climate action than direct emissions from the sector.’

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