Privacy as a proxy for Green Web browsing: Methodology and experimentation

Nowadays, users’ privacy on the Internet is highly at risk, due to the monetization by advertising companies that support many of the so-called “free” services such as searching or social networking. In fact, several mechanisms are used to monitor users and build detailed profiles to tailor behavioral advertising. Given the increasing use of mobile devices and the increasing revenues from behavioral advertising, large advertising companies are present in this market as well. The increasing use of mobile devices for interacting with the Web and using mobile applications has been also drawing attention to their energy consumption. Several studies have addressed this issue from different point of views, i.e., hardware, software, as well as by analyzing the energy drained by different mobile applications. Our goal in this work is to measure the effectiveness of a methodology that exploits a hardware-based instrumentation to study whether privacy-preserving mechanisms are also able to efficiently reduce communication and computation overhead and, thus, save the battery life of mobile phones with the overall aim of a more sustainable Internet.