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.

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.