arXiv subjects

Nils Bonfils

Publications and source records attributed to Nils Bonfils.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Scoping Review of Methods to Measure the Energy and Carbon Footprint of Web Tracking and Advertising

The environmental impact of web tracking and advertising is increasingly receiving attention as the ICT sector's carbon footprint keeps rising. Yet the scholarship addressing this question remains scattered across disciplines and inconsistent in its terminology. This paper presents a scoping review of the literature on methods for measuring the energy and carbon footprint of web tracking and advertising. From an initial pool of 46 articles identified through a structured title-based search on Google Scholar, we arrived at a final corpus of 15 papers, from which we identified five distinct methodological approaches: ad blocking, controlled environment, replaying ads, traffic flow analysis, and literature-derived estimation. This review provides a structured overview of the current methodological landscape and a foundation for more comprehensive environmental accounting of the ad tech ecosystem.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Relational Aesthesis in Permacomputing Practice: Building a Solar Powered Website from Reclaimed Materials

Permacomputing is a nascent concept and community of practice concerned with developing alternative computing systems grounded in principles of resilience, reuse, sufficiency, and ecological limits. However, research engaging with permacomputing remains in an early stage of development, raising concerns about whether permacomputing can move beyond reflective critique to become a meaningful alternative practice. Through a research-through-design case study, we documented our experience moving a personal website from a data centre in Texas to a self-hosted solar-powered server built from reclaimed electronics. Guided by permacomputing principles and relational aesthesis, we explore what it takes for permacomputing to reconfigure material and perceptual relations. Our findings reveal the frictions of moving away from a maximalist techno-aesthetic while attempting to re-use already existing technologies, potential ways to overcome these challenges through building a community of practice, and the transformative potential of visibilizing and visceralizing digital infrastructures to cultivate more responsible ways of relating to technology. This paper contributes to emerging research on permacomputing and its aesthetics by bringing it into dialogue with theories of non-place and relational aesthesis. Rather than functioning as a purely symbolic gesture, permacomputing practices can cultivate greater collective autonomy, agency, and responsibility in how communities engage and create meaning within digital infrastructures. In the context of socio-ecological crises and anti-colonial transformation, our research offers a situated approach to building and relating to computing technologies in the ashes of dominant technological paradigms.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

The Environmental Costs of Surveillance Capitalism: A Case Study of Social Media Platforms

The business model of surveillance capitalism, premised on the extraction of behavioral data and its predictive potential for profit, relies on extensive material infrastructure. Such profit is typically driven by practices such as telemetry, user tracking, data analytics, secondary data uses, increased user engagement, and AI model training, as well as large-scale data storage systems that retain personal information for sale or reuse. This paper is motivated by the question: how much of the rising carbon impact of ICT can be attributed to this material infrastructure? Such an inquiry provides a foundation for quantifying the environmental costs of surveillance capitalism by proposing a conceptual framework and research direction that link processes of surveillance with their underlying material realities. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework, we examine the proportion of network traffic caused by surveillance capitalism processes through a comparative case study of a corporate social media platform, X/formerly Twitter, and a decentralized, non-commercial alternative, Mastodon. Our findings highlight the existence of corporate overhead: excess resource consumption driven by corporate social media practices, which is used as an initial proxy for the activities of surveillance capitalism. Our findings further demonstrate how the corporate overhead of X can be used to establish a lower bound in CO2e emissions attributable to for-profit activities that do not contribute to the user experience.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

An Empirical Inquiry into Surveillance Capitalism: Web Tracking

The modern web is increasingly characterized by the pervasiveness of Surveillance Capitalism. This investigation employs an empirical approach to examine this phenomenon through the web tracking practices of major tech companies -- specifically Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) -- and their relation to financial performance indicators. Using longitudinal data from WhoTracks.Me spanning from 2017 to 2025 and publicly accessible SEC filings, this paper analyzes patterns and trends in web tracking data to establish empirical evidence of Surveillance Capitalism's extraction mechanisms. Our findings reveal Google's omnipresent position on the web, a three-tier stratification among GAFAM companies in the surveillance space, and evidence suggesting an evolution of tracking techniques to evade detection. The investigation further discusses the social and environmental costs of web tracking and how alternative technologies, such as the Gemini protocol, offer pathways to challenge the extractive logic of this new economic order. By closely examining surveillance activities, this research contributes to an ongoing effort to better understand the current state and future trajectory of Surveillance Capitalism.

cs.CY↗