Energy consumption and privacy in mobile Web browsing: Individual issues and connected solutions

Abstract Providing mechanisms to improve energy efficiency of mobile devices is, in the past few years, one of the important objectives in the field of green computing and energy savings. Several studies have addressed this issue from different point of views, i.e., hardware, software, as well as by analyzing the energy drained by different mobile applications. On the other hand, the energy consumption of Web browsing activities has been poorly addressed, given the lack of analysis about users’ real browsing sessions. In this paper we explore how energy savings in mobile devices can be effectively tackled by switching on/off filtering techniques offered by a privacy-enhancing technology. We present first, results about a survey that we conducted to understand the beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and expectations of mobile users towards privacy and energy issues, and their behavioral intention on what kind of countermeasures adopt to reduce their privacy leakage. Then, we present a tool, mNoTrace, that allows to protect privacy during Web Navigation and prove, by an experimental study, that, by helping users in protecting their privacy, mNoTrace also achieves a significant reduction in terms of communication and computation overhead and thus battery consumption. Conclusions, remarks and lessons learned on our experimental methodology, that employs hardware-based instrumentation, real workloads, and testing on real sites, will conclude the paper.