Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones

Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by Arrath on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @02:47PM (#32841503)

While not reflecting on the carbon footprint, I was surprised to see just how many queries from my phone were blocked by PiHole once I set it up. Every minute, even when sitting there not being used. What an eventual waste of battery, data and processing power.

I do wonder how many of those queries may be repetitions upon the first one being blocked but even still.

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Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by asdff on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @05:45PM (#32843833)

What really sucks about the more recent ios versions is that they make it a little counterintuitive to shut off your radios when you don't need them. If you want to actually shut off your wifi or blutooth its in your Settings app, the buttons in the control center don't actually shut things off.

Sometimes I just throw the device in airplaine mode for a while if I am busy or overnight. This is a lot better than low power mode; the device just sips power and can probably be on standby for a week versus hopefully a day with all the services on the device phoning home in the background. I flick it on when I have a chance to actually follow up on text or calls, and they come in a few seconds after.

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Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by Arrath on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @06:32PM (#32844333)

> What really sucks about the more recent ios versions is that they make it a little counterintuitive to shut off your radios when you don't need them. If you want to actually shut off your wifi or blutooth its in your Settings app, the buttons in the control center don't actually shut things off.

This annoys the absolute hell out of me.

> Sometimes I just throw the device in airplaine mode for a while if I am busy or overnight.

I have made a habit of doing the same when I'm going somewhere remote that doesn't have service, else the phone will thrash the battery to death vainly searching for signal.

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Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by asdff on Thursday September 15, 2022 @04:38PM (#32858137)

The phone looking for signal issue could have been solved when cellphones first came out even. The phone internally knows what cell tower its pinging. You flag ones around the fringes of known no service areas like a natural park. If the user hikes off into the woods, the phone is capable of knowing its going into a no service area based on the id of last cell tower its pinged and the fact that its just lost signal for longer than 30 seconds. At which point it could switch to hunting for signal every 10 minutes or something with better compromises for battery life and realistic expectations given the area.

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Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by Nition on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @11:16PM (#32846547)

This annoyed me too, but I worked out a solution to having to go into Settings or airplane mode every time you want to disable wifi: Make a Shortcut for it and make that shortcut an icon on the home screen.

I made a Shortcut icon named All Off that fully turns off WiFi, Data, and Bluetooth with one press. Easy to set up in the Shortcuts app.

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Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by Melatonic on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @09:13PM (#32845751)

And now apps are using encrypted DNS to get around that :-)

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