Climate Impact of Clicking Cookie Preferences

Climate Impact of Clicking Cookie Preferences

Annoying and Bad for the Planet

It is very annoying having to click on Cookie Preferences nags for every website you visit. And it this pointless exercise is also killing the planet, releasing approximately 18,000 tons of CO2 to atmosphere every year, in the UK alone. 

Every interaction with you smart gadget, or PC or Macintosh, uses energy. At present a percentage of that energy comes from fossil fuel. 

Every time you select you cookie preferences, this triggers a series of operations to be run on a server somewhere in the "cloud", using energy as it does so. 

Estimating Climate Change Impact of GDPR

GDPR is a piece of legislation that was passed to protect users data. However, in practice this means 99% of website just ask our permission (the cookie preferences clicking thing) and then take our data anyway. 

If you go to advanced options and select preferences individual it would more than double the amount of  time to took to search things on the internet. 

Text Messages Example

Now to send a text message, which is a fairly basic text based interaction over a network, the carbon equivalent footprint is 0.014gCO2e. Not a huge amount but on an annual global  basis this means the the carbon footprint of text messages is 32,000 tonnes/CO2e.

32,000 tonnes/CO2e would cover all emissions for 2600 UK citizens, that foods, travel, heating, purchases etc. so no small amount. 

How Many Clicks 

There are 3.5 billion search queries every day in UK. If each of these simple text based interactions have the same carbon footprint as a text message (which is quite likely). Then we are release 49 tons of carbon dioxide a day, that is approx 18,000 tons of CO2e a year released to atmosphere.

If we consider that most of the time these interacct allow website owners to then go on and use our data how they see fit, rather then actually protecting us, I would suggest this is a colossal waste of carbon, which we badly need to stop emitting. 

Ideas

Thanks to GDPR we now have to opt in by default, so that big data can hoover up our tasty information. This means we have to click to opt in on nearly every website we visit. Perhaps we should opt out instead. 

Some website it is useful to have cookies "recognise you" oin your return. Internet banking for example, on these sites there could be a button (on the page not on a pop up) saying "click here to enable cookies". That way 90% of these pointless interactions would be immediately erased. Saving 10's of thousands of tonnes of CO2 in the UK alone. 

Carbon Footprint Consultants