Google generates most of its revenue through targeted advertising. Here is a brief analysis of its business model to better understand the issues and impacts of digital usage related to the tools offered by Google.
Advertising-Based Business Model
Google, like the other subsidiaries of the holding company Alphabet, uses user data (search history, websites visited, locations, etc.) to create user profiles and tailor advertisements to them. This is the foundation of its business model.
When you perform a search on the Google search engine, ads appear among the results. Advertisers pay to have their ads displayed when they match the search terms.
Through its Display advertising network, Google displays ads on millions of partner websites in the form of banners, videos, or other formats. Advertisers pay to have their ads shown on these sites.
Through the Gmail email service, Google analyzes emails to display ads within the Gmail interface based on the content of the messages.
Google owns YouTube, and advertisers can run ads before, during, or after videos. The revenue generated by these ads is shared between Google and content creators.
Google, which owns the Android operating system and the Chrome browser, collects data from computers, smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and smart TVs. Advertisers can display targeted ads in mobile apps through Google’s AdMob network.
Google uses an auction system to determine which ads will be displayed. Advertisers bid on keywords or ad placements, and Google selects the ads based on several factors, including the bid amount and the relevance of the ad.
Privacy Violations
Like other companies funded by targeted advertising, Google collects vast amounts of user data. With an increasing number of connected devices tracking our every move throughout our daily lives, this information is particularly precise—and also highly personal. This includes search queries, browsing history, location data, and interactions with Google services. It also includes biometric data linked to fingerprint readers, facial recognition, and other metrics that should be considered medical confidentiality, such as blood pressure or heart rate measured by smartwatches.
Google’s services are presented as gratis, but they are not, since in exchange you must agree to let the company collect data to personalize ads and improve its algorithms. This surrender of privacy, personal intimacy, and medical confidentiality is, in our view, a very high price to pay.
Despite Google’s stated privacy policy, email analysis remains a common practice, under the pretext of offering personalized and secure services. Other “free” email providers do the same... Would we accept the mail carrier reading our correspondence the way Google and others do with our email?
Environmental Impact
Google collects and stores enormous amounts of data on its users. This amounts to thousands of terabytes, spread across thousands of servers. Targeted advertising requires intensive processing of this data to segment audiences and optimize campaigns. Artificial intelligence models used in advertising (such as Smart Bidding) require massive computational power.
Google is one of the major players in the programmatic advertising market, with platforms such as Google AdX and Google Ads. Google holds the largest share of the online targeted advertising market, estimated at 25%, ahead of Meta (Facebook) at 21% and Amazon at 14%1.
Programmatic advertising, an automated method for buying and selling online ad space, involves dozens of intermediaries, each of which adds additional server requests. When a web page containing an ad loads, the browser sends a request to the website. The website contacts an ad server, which initiates an auction among hundreds of ad networks. Each ad network may make additional requests to check the user’s cookies, analyze their browsing history, and tailor the ad based on geographic or demographic criteria or any other information in their profile. The winning bidder sends the final ad to the browser. Each step of the process can trigger multiple server requests: cookie verification (10–20 requests), user profile analysis (20–30 requests), competing bids (50–100 requests)... Each auction participant can send requests. These requests are invisible to the end user but require computational processing, memory, and bandwidth, contributing to the carbon footprint of data centers. At the network level, the volume of data exchanged increases, which consumes energy in the infrastructure. If a website displays 10 ads, this can generate 1,000 to 2,000 server requests, which significantly increases the load on the infrastructure.
In 2024, Google consumed 32.18 TWh of electricity. This consumption has doubled in four years, as it stood at 15.5 TWh in 20202.
It is very difficult to estimate the share of targeted advertising in the Internet’s energy consumption. Companies do not provide sufficiently precise data: when it concerns them, they prefer to keep the data private... A scientific study estimates that in 2016, online advertising consumed 106 TWh of energy (between 20 and 282 TWh, accounting for uncertainty) out of a total Internet infrastructure consumption of approximately 1,059 TWh (between 791 and 1,334 TWh)3. Based on these figures, targeted advertising would account for 10% of the Internet’s energy consumption (in 2016 and before the rapid development of AI). Given Google’s business model, its energy consumption related to targeted advertising certainly accounts for more than 10% of its total consumption.
To put this into perspective, 106 TWh is roughly the total amount of electricity consumed in the Netherlands over the course of a year4; it is roughly the annual consumption of 25 million French households5; or, it is one-third of the annual output of France's 18 nuclear power plants6.
The energy demand from data centers has contributed to the revival of coal- and gas-fired power plants, and it is also driving the accelerated development of nuclear energy worldwide. Google is particularly involved in these projects7.
Finally, targeted advertising encourages overconsumption by prompting the purchase of unnecessary goods. This comes with its own set of negative consequences, including pollution and waste.
Conclusion
To protect your privacy and reduce the environmental impact of digital usage, you should avoid using Google and its services. Turning to competitors like Apple or Microsoft is not a solution, since to varying degrees these companies participate in the same model of data collection, targeted advertising, encouraging unnecessary consumption, and planned obsolescence. Fortunately, there are alternatives, such as free software like Linux, as well as online services that respect your privacy and are ad-free.
