GDPR Brings Massive Speed Improvement to Websites

[LAwLz]

Not sure if this is news but whatever.

Because of GDPR, a lot of websites now has to give EU users the choice to disable tracking. While this is great for privacy, it also seems to have made a wonderful difference in terms of performance too.

A web developer named Marcel Freinbichler posted on twitter some benchmarks he has made. He has compared the US version of websites to the EU version (with trackers disabled). Here are some results.

 

USA Today page size:

EU - 500KB

US with uBlock - Over 1000KB

US - 5.2MB

 

USA Today page load time:

EU - 3.1 seconds

US with uBlock - 21.5 seconds

US - 45 seconds

 

USA Today JavaScripts:

EU - 0

US with uBlock - 37 scripts

US - 124 scripts

 

 

The Verge page size:

US - 2MB

EU - 1MB

 

The Verge page load time:

US - 32 seconds

EU - 5 seconds

 

The Verge JavaScripts:

US - 61 scripts

EU - 2 scripts

 

 

Source: Marcel Freinbichler's Twitter

 

 

The conclusion is pretty clear. The reason why computers has gotten so much more powerful yet things like web browsing doesn't seem to become any faster, is because there is an ever increasing amount of tracking going on. Things like tracking and ads is the vast majority of data and processing being done in your browser these days.

If websites turned all of these data harvesting things off, the Internet would probably become 5-10 times as fast, and pages would be about half the size.

 

It's worth mentioning that the EU versions of the sites still has all the content people actually want, and works just fine.

 

 

Please note that the tests were made using Lighthouse, which simulates a "real world" test by throttling network speeds and CPU performance. So while the test says The Verge loaded in 32 seconds for the US site, it will most likely load faster if you sit on a desktop with a fiber connection.

It is a good tool for comparing websites though since the throttling if applied equally to all tests.

[potoooooooo]

Too bad this isn't going to change anything. USA today removed all of their tracking. Not just the stuff that GDPR was making illegal. As soon as they can get their lawyers on it it will be getting worse again.

[Centurius]

8 minutes ago, potoooooooo said:

Too bad this isn't going to change anything. USA today removed all of their tracking. Not just the stuff that GDPR was making illegal. As soon as they can get their lawyers on it it will be getting worse again.

They've had well over two years to figure out loopholes.

[Skizzy_34]

Having different versions of websites for the US, and other countries, and the EU, just shows how shady these companies are. "We're not gonna track consumers in the EU, but in those other countries, you're data is ours, because the law says we can have it.."

[mr moose]

What measures did he take to counter for the traffic having to travel farther?  I mean is there a way he could account for distance and route issues between Eu and US servers.  I know US webpages take forever to load here in Australia while local pages are in general exceedingly faster.

[CTR640]

The mankind is such a cancer. Why they **** are they so data-hungry? Do these morons wanna know about my favorite food?

Do they wanna know when I start touching myself? Do they wanna know how much litre of liquid I drink each day? F***k these f**ks. These kind of mankind makes me puke and vomit all the way to the next galaxy.

 

Tracking also costs you your bandwith from your monthly subscriptions, so you kinda are robbing yourself.

[Deus Voltage]

23 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

The mankind is such a cancer. Why they **** are they so data-hungry? Do these morons wanna know about my favorite food?

Do they wanna know when I start touching myself? Do they wanna know how much litre of liquid I drink each day? F***k these f**ks. These kind of mankind makes me puke and vomit all the way to the next galaxy.

 

Tracking also costs you your bandwith from your monthly subscriptions, so you kinda are robbing yourself.

Big data= faster AI advancements. That's my rough and superficial analysis. 

[Castdeath97]

1 hour ago, James Evens said:

ps. for more gdpr fun: https://gdprhallofshame.com/

 

This is killing me

 

https://gdprhallofshame.com/20-fridge-meet-gdpr/

 

 

[LAwLz]

17 minutes ago, mr moose said:

What measures did he take to counter for the traffic having to travel farther?  I mean is there a way he could account for distance and route issues between Eu and US servers.  I know US webpages take forever to load here in Australia while local pages are in general exceedingly faster.

Both the EU and US versions were throttled to the same latency and bandwidth. He doesn't specifically say which throttling he used, but he did say he used the 3G throttling method and the default one is 150ms latency, with a download link speed of 1.6Mbps and 750Kbps up.

 

These delays are applied after the data has been retrieved locally to your computer. So even if the EU website has a latency of let's say 10ms, the packet will be fetched and then sit in a cache for 140ms before being presented to the browser for rendering.

 

As long as the latency to the US website isn't higher than 150ms, and the bandwidth isn't lower than 1.6Mbps down, they should be very comparable despite the drastic geographical locations.

More info can be found in the Lighthouse documentation.

 

I just tried connecting to a US server in New York from Sweden and got a latency of 81ms, and a bandwidth of 229/73Mbps. So it shouldn't be an issue unless that developer in Austria somehow got twice as high latency as I have. But since he never posted any evidence to support this we'll just have to guess that he isn't an idiot. I mean, considering he is a web developer using tools to measure performance, and enabled the throttling, we kind of have to assume he is competent enough to not make such mistakes.

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Both the EU and US versions were throttled to the same latency and bandwidth. He doesn't specifically say which throttling he used, but he did say he used the 3G throttling method and the default one is 150ms latency, with a download link speed of 1.6Mbps and 750Kbps up.

 

These delays are applied after the data has been retrieved locally to your computer. So even if the EU website has a latency of let's say 10ms, the packet will be fetched and then sit in a cache for 140ms before being presented to the browser for rendering.

 

As long as the latency to the US website isn't higher than 150ms, and the bandwidth isn't lower than 1.6Mbps down, they should be very comparable despite the drastic geographical locations.

More info can be found in the Lighthouse documentation.

 

I just tried connecting to a US server in New York from Sweden and got a latency of 81ms, and a bandwidth of 229/73Mbps. So it shouldn't be an issue unless that developer in Austria somehow got twice as high latency as I have. But since he never posted any evidence to support this we'll just have to guess that he isn't an idiot. I mean, considering he is a web developer using tools to measure performance, and enabled the throttling, we kind of have to assume he is competent enough to not make such mistakes.

I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt, because he hasn't really got anything to gain from lying and a bit to lose if he gets caught out.

 

I compared news.com.au which ghostery blocks something like 24 trackers/ads/etc but is locally hosted and it takes less than 5 secs to load, while LTT from canada which only has 5  takes close to 20 secs.

 

It's anecdotal I know,  but I'd like to understand it a bit better.

[Dabombinable]

So that's why web browsing on old computers has become so shit.

[Bananasplit_00]

GDPR is just the best. Like I don't know the rules inside and out but I love it just because of stuff like this, and that the big boys are being dragged to court(maybe) and its just so funny and awesome that I can't help but love it all

[Lurick]

40 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

GDPR is just the best. Like I don't know the rules inside and out but I love it just because of stuff like this, and that the big boys are being dragged to court(maybe) and its just so funny and awesome that I can't help but love it all

Look up Right to Be Forgotten and how that's being abused like crazy by criminals and other people to take down all articles talking about their crimes so nobody can find anything about them. If I recall correctly it's also become part of the GDPR or at least is now EU wide.

 

Edit:

Additionally there are quite a few reports on how the laws are not completely uniform across the EU so for example, what might be applicable in Germany isn't applicable in France for one part but is applicable in both for another part.

[mark_cameron]

3 hours ago, Lurick said:

Look up Right to Be Forgotten and how that's being abused like crazy by criminals and other people to take down all articles talking about their crimes so nobody can find anything about them. If I recall correctly it's also become part of the GDPR or at least is now EU wide.

 

Edit:

Additionally there are quite a few reports on how the laws are not completely uniform across the EU so for example, what might be applicable in Germany isn't applicable in France for one part but is applicable in both for another part.

That's incorrect.

 

As a European Union Regulation:

 

It doesn't need to be put on a statute book or implemented in national law. Any differences is due to OTHER national laws and not the GDPR.

 

Or where GDPR itself says national laws apply. Of which there will be few as the purpose of an EC/EU regulation is to harmonise in one action.

 

Don't confuse DPD (Data Protection Directive) with GPDR. Which has just started and replaced DPD.

 

A European Directive is different to a European Regulation. It requires member states to implement it and there are greater scope for national interest variations. A regulation does not.

 

European Regulation becomes law automatically. Everywhere in EU/EEA.

 

European Directives are less powerful than regulations. The old law that was technically in force up to 25th May when it was repealed. Was a directive.

 

Regulations also overrides national law.

 

It's harder to get a European Regulation in place. Politically and legally.

[Mihle]

3 hours ago, mark_cameron said:

 

European Regulation becomes law automatically. Everywhere in EU/EEA.

 

Just remember that laws and stuff that is greated in EU is not automatically happening in EEA. EEA has its own vote on stuff if they will pick it up too.

[asus killer]

for most sites i disable cookies and ads both in the PC and the phone, the difference in performance for the browser is insane.

 

USA today loads instantly to me 

[ScratchCat]

An interesting side effect of GDPR is that those who use add-ons like CookieAutoDelete now have to either add the website to the whitelist or have to deal with repetitive popups as the companies require consent from each user who seems to have not previously agreed. 

[Doobeedoo]

That's good. Unnecessary invasive bloat tracking shit disabled. Just makes you wonder how much data harvesting is done when you see these differences. 

[Delicieuxz]

This is a big reason why we need more regulation on personal data generating and harvesting. And just think, the right-side image is also like what is happening in Windows 10 with the actions that a person does in the OS.

 

Also, I haven't read up too much on the details of GDPR, but is it possible for EU site visits to still be made to behave like the image on the right, if the site owner simply words their disclaimer in a way that lets them know their data is being collected and used?

 

https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1000094333524201473

 

 

 

You can explore the details of the US site's request map here: http://domainmap.webperf.tools/render/180525_JN_47e779799e746bc1e1a325eb464ae006/

[Ithanul]

Hmmm, seems I can load it fairly fast.  Got to love rocking a two prong blocker approach.  Especially one that can be set to selective allow or block scripts.

Load in like 1s for me.

[Trixanity]

22 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

snip

Those are some interesting comments on that tweet you linked:

GDPR is bad. We need tracking because pedophiles. Also, companies will go broke without tracking. However, pedophiles!

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Dionyz]

17 hours ago, CTR640 said:

The mankind is such a cancer. Why they **** are they so data-hungry? Do these morons wanna know about my favorite food?

Do they wanna know when I start touching myself? Do they wanna know how much litre of liquid I drink each day? F***k these f**ks. These kind of mankind makes me puke and vomit all the way to the next galaxy.

 

Tracking also costs you your bandwith from your monthly subscriptions, so you kinda are robbing yourself.

 

I am a marketer and it’s a simple reason. We want to know our markets. Honestly we wouldn’t have to track anyone if everyone just did surveys.

 

This type of data is very valuable to have. People are willing to pay millions because they can earn millions by catering to the market. (Each market is different and trends change)

 

Its a win - win for everyone since we can identify issues of why sales are low or what people would like more of. Just imagine if we couldn’t take data by tracking inventory there would be shortages or surplus’s and the consumers are going to pay for it.

[CTR640]

1 minute ago, Dionyz said:

 

I am a marketer and it’s a simple reason. We want to know our markets. Honestly we wouldn’t have to track anyone if everyone just did surveys.

 

This type of data is very valuable to have. People are willing to pay millions because they can earn millions by catering to the market. (Each market is different and trends change)

And there is the problem: there is no limit when to stop. Instead, they just go way too deep, much deeper than quantumphysica.

There is not much of a problem when marketing about travels or favorite places but they just wanna know how many times you take a breath and how many a day you take a dump each day. If a company wants me to take a pic of of color, lengt and size of my turd, sure no problem, I'll gladly send them the pic. But without asking me for my permission is a no-go.

[Delicieuxz]

How do people feel about the fact that they're paying for faster internet service only to compensate for the loss of speed and performance that data harvesting on the internet is causing?

 

It's no different than taking money out of your pocket and paying it directly to advertisers - for the purpose of enabling them to advertise to you. People are literally subsidizing all these companies' data farms (with both their cash and their PCs and their software licenses) without any knowledge of it.

 

Do you have a $75 / internet plan? $25 or possibly more of that is just to offset the performance slowdown created by all the data harvesting that sites are doing on you.

 

And how much Windows 10 performance is lost for people due to all the data generating, tracking, and harvesting that Microsoft is doing in Windows 10?

 

Because of a lack of regulation on data harvesting, people are continually paying huge bucks just to be exploited by companies and corporations, with no benefit to the people that are doing the paying. People are being swindled and having money just taken out of their pockets.

[Dionyz]

3 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

And there is the problem: there is no limit when to stop. Instead, they just go way too deep, much deeper than quantumphysica.

There is not much of a problem when marketing about travels or favorite places but they just wanna know how many times you take a breath and how many a day you take a dump each day. If a company wants me to take a pic of of color, lengt and size of my turd, sure no problem, I'll gladly send them the pic. But without asking me for my permission is a no-go.

If the data can benefit businesses then they would like the data, but if it’s not beneficial they don’t want it. It’s not that they are trying to track your life through memories, but it’s more focused on seeing what you personally like, so they can give you more varieties of the product (if a vast majority like the same stuff as you) 

 

By tracking this data about you they can also not waste your time. Just imagine if you hate baby stuff and they were to spam it to your mail. You would be pissed off and tell them to stop. (But if they gave you computer related deals then you might be fine)