Performance Analysis of Trackers and Ads on the Browser

Abstract

Trackers and ads are becoming more and more prevalent in today’s internet infrastructure. Trackers, mainly Javascript, send user information about a user’s session to a remote server, where commercial companies can build a pseudo-anonymous profile of the user and generate targeted ads based on that profile. Often, these scripts and ads take up a lot of the bandwidth, page load time, and screen space, which distracts the user from actual content and takes up valuable resources by forcing the browser to serve these trackers and ads. Research has been done on how these trackers are implemented and ways to minimize the effect of trackers and ads on content, but not enough research has been done on the quantitative effect of trackers and ads on load time and data usage. This paper seeks to lessen this gap in understanding and provides a general analysis of how much data usage/load time is impacted via certain categories of trackers and certain websites.