Anyone who has ever used the internet has likely also utilized Google’s search engine. One of the reasons why Google is so popular is because of its power of simplicity. The front page isn’t engineered to have any superfluous bells and whistles. Nothing to clutter it up or confuse the user as to its function. You simply need a place to input text and search for whatever information it is that you are looking for. It looks exactly relevant to what you are trying to do: search for information. Rather, because Google has fully ensconced itself as an internet verb, Google something.
While the homepage itself is simplistic enough, let’s look a little deeper at the mechanics of it. This simple homepage rendered in HTML clocks in around 36KB. That’s without following HTML best practices. When you load google.com it actually transmits almost 1MB worth of data (812KB to be precise in my case). It loads 46 different files and, if you keep the page open for a while, background requests continually load content. By the time I was done typing this paragraph, 14 more requests have already been processed.
To Google’s credit, they leverage a technique called caching. Caching can store multiple data copies or files in a temporary storage, or cache, for faster access at a later period in time. This technique stores some of these data files on your computer so that you don’t have to download certain information every time you log on to use your phone or computer. Data can be cached for apps, website browsers, and servers. Such data gets stored for re-access in your phone or computer’s memory.
Even with caching employed, when you refresh a webpage, that previous data number jumps to a whopping 111KB with 25 separate requests to the server.
The Cost of Browsing
With recent shifts in pricing over the internet, we know that most consumers do not receive free unlimited data transfers. Google is merely one such example. If you look at most websites, similar techniques are being hoisted onto consumers everywhere.
If you look at such data transfers closely, these transfers mostly include data that is being used to track your preferences and your activities. It’s a simple process to confirm this for yourself. If you are on any modern browser, you can open the developer tools, go to the networks tab, and there you’ll be able to see each request being transferred. Let’s take Firefox as an example. You’ll want to navigate to the top right settings corner of your browser, click down to More Tools, select Web Developer Tools, and select the Network tab. Here, you’ll be able to what data, if any, is being collected on you via this browser.
Looking even further, in the case of Google specifically, you can go to your Google account homepage and see what profile Google has built on you based on your browsing history. Google can build extensive profiles on a user. Profiles might include anything from if you have pets or not, your age range, your political leanings and beyond. Google builds and molds you into a certain profile based on your perceived online preferences and activities. This is called ad personalization. The capability Google has to fine-tune your internet persona and personal leanings is scarily accurate.
Looking even further in terms of tracking, what happens when you buy bandwidth for your phone or your home? You are essentially paying two-thirds of that cost to your internet provider just for these companies to turn around and track your every online move. So, yes, these services are truly never free. You might not be paying these companies directly. However, you are incurring a much more alarming fee than a few dollars from your own pocket. Depending upon the free service you use, such as YouTube videos driven by ads, you are paying money to see such advertisements and for a company to start building and tracking a profile on you based on your interests. So, I cannot stress enough the fact that beyond the functional usage of these services, you are paying to get these services for free. You might not be paying in monetary ways, but through an intangible invasion to your online privacy.
For example, if a YouTube video is unable to load an advertisement as opposed to loading a video with full ads, we have observed that one-third of the data transfer that occurs is for advertisements alone.
Based on an experiment we ran with some of the more popular free websites, we observed that almost 30% of traffic is actually used to track you or to serve you advertisements. In the United States, an average user pays about $3.05 per gigabyte of data. Out of each gigabyte you paid for, $1 is the potential cost you are paying for such free services. This is the cost paid other than the actual functionality of such services.
How Much Are You Willing to Pay?
Now one might argue that even though you’re paying for internet bandwidth for Google’s analysis, Google itself is not receiving any of that money. It’s a fair point worth discussing, however, that is not the point of this particular article. What I’m trying to outline here is simply to let you know that even when certain services are advertised as free nothing is truly free. You will still be paying money out of your own pocket to avail such services, by paying excess to the internet provider.
In our digital age, online content and data are not free. Unseen costs will always be associated with online activity. For many, the unseen cost is simply something to put up with. Targeted ads and hidden tracking are an inconvenience, but something many are willing to put up with in order to simplify their online experience. Next time you fire up your laptop to Google something, take a moment to think of the cost of the knowledge you’re seeking. In today’s data-driven world, you can easily search for the truth, but you might not like what you find. Information comes at a cost and what you find online isn’t necessarily free.