Could solving Mobile Privacy Speed up the Web?
by Peter
Yes, Virginia it sure could… How?
Well let’s think about it for a moment and revisit an old blog post – “Privacy on the Internet is NOT binary” I started with a definition from Wikipedia….
Privacy (from Latin: privatus “separated from the rest, deprived of something, esp. office, participation in the government”, from privo “to deprive”) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively. The boundaries and content of what is considered private differ among cultures and individuals, but share basic common themes.
When something is private to a person, it usually means there is something within them that is considered inherently special or personally sensitive. The degree to which private information is exposed therefore depends on how the public will receive this information, which differs between places and over time. Privacy partially intersects security, including for instance the concepts of appropriate use, as well as protection, of information.
What privacy allows us to do is be selective in what we share. It includes data about myself, my current location, my device that i’m using to connect with etc. In essence it’s context. The more context you have about something, or somebody, or some location, then the more PRECISE your response can be.
And Virginia therein lies the key to unlocking performance on the Internet – the precision you can bring to your response then the faster it will get there. Here’s a simple example. Yesterday I ran a performance test on Google’s Mobile home page. Here are the results…
- Load time was 5.789 seconds on Sprints network
- Page size was 525.83kb – that’s 525,830 bytes worth of data
Think about that for a moment. Google sent over ½ MB of data to my Mobile phone and it still had to ask me for access to my current location. Imagine for a moment that I could transmit my personal information to Google BEFORE it had to send a response back to me. Instead of ½ MB you could drop it down to less than 100,000 bytes of data. That’s an 80% drop in the data sent. And on top of that I get a personal response.
So there you have it – Privacy really can help speed up the Web. The more you trust and share with content providers then the better job they’ll be able to do with the response that you get back.
Posted in: #mobile, #webperf, Performance, Privacy