Says the site with ~20-30 crapware JS trackers (12 blocked by uBlock, 23 by uMatrix). I'm not forgiving FB here, just pointing out that others are often similarly bad.
E.g. I tried deleting Chrome from my mobile and I can't, I could only disable it. So crapware too? I'd say yes.
PS: read about "notifications" and remembered a funny story about Chrome. I was once given a Samsung phone to fix some AD notifications coming up regularly. And it was not obvious for some reason who was sending them. Apparently some apps can hijack default browser setting and force open their links in Chrome (which, again, isn't possible to remove), and Chrome by default allowed notifications from sites. After guessing this and opening Chrome I found out that there were several dozen open tabs, and some them were sending "useful" notifications. Default browser on that phone since buying the device was "Internet" app by Samsung. Same stuff, only without notifications, also happened on my own phone where Firefox is default. Until I force disabled Chrome some apps continued to hijack defaults and opened links in Chrome.
They avoid it because you can't install any apps (and F-Droid isn't a solution for most people). And without apps you might as well buy a legacy phone.
And it's not just facebook, it's an industry wide ( or even an economy wide problem ). It's everybody - google, microsoft and yes, even apple ( despite what their fans think ). And of course techcrunch and the rest of the media.
I guess I was wrong about the end of the anti-facebook clickbait media stories this year.
I found a paper written in 2010 for the Netherlands [1], claiming that : "Thus, web advertisements increase the total energy consumption of PCs by 3.4%."
That's not counting the cost of running the infrastructure, and I suspect ads and tracking probably did not evolve in the right (i.e. less energy hungry) way in the last 9 years.
As for the current consumption of power by 'client devices', it is estimated to consume 5% of total world electricity [2]
I could not find any number on the energy consumption on the other side, i.e. servers/infras.
As a (very) rough estimation, without taking into account the 'server' side of ads, we can estimate the energy cost of ads to represent ~0.17% of total energy produced in a year.
In the end, I stand corrected : the amount of energy consumed is far from negligible at that scale. However, while it is definitely not negligible on absolute terms, I think there are lower hanging fruits to focus on to fight global warming, such as reliance on fossil fuels, common use of products made on the other side of the world, meat consumption...
[1] : https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-hidden-energ... [2] : http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/12/11/tsunami-data-con...
My view is that adblocking is an environmental necessity. And paying business model should always be provided. As a footnote, they estimated that If Netflix switched to a video ad model, 42.02 TWh of added electricity would be consumed!
[1]:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592551...
TL;DR: Blocker extensions are easy but they can be compromised.
You could actually roll your own uBlock extension: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
then write a script that updates it in your browser. Is that safe enough? :)
Trying to keep the head space clean, and there is only so much time at my disposal with caring for a family.
So at the same time I got pissed about how much deps sites rely on, I discovered that there wasn't much to miss either. It's like dropping facebook, just a relief. To be fair I'm talking about news outlets mainly.
I was there when we had the BBS with dial-up modems. HTML was sweet, but it got quite boring when it faced reality. It's easy for people to share now, but just how easy can it be for people to care about what they share and how? (Like caring about how much tracking there is etc.)
My wife and I strongly disagree, she lives in the real world and actually like how well she can communicate and I'm just overwhelmed instead and care about the technicalities.
The jury's still out on the health effects of our digital culture. It's too strange and too young to really get clean long-term results on it. But I would be utterly floored if it was having no significant effect on our well-being and culture. There's probably some positive and some negative, but hey--cigarettes help aid digestion, after all.
I've written about it here before, but leaving the digital life completely for periods is easily the most healthiest things I've done.
The idea that interaction implies blanket consent is silly.
Probably still wouldn't dissuade most buyers, unfortunately.
I imagine advertising "Hey, User, remember that amazing Phone Model 1 you could buy for 600$? Now you can buy it with included spying software for your convenience, for the same amazing 600$ and we will earn 20 cents more from each deal! How cool is that, heh?! You want it too, right?!" :)
Like paying to go to a movie theater doesn't mean you can choose to skip the ads before the show.