8 ms·
Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones
- eulgro 4y agoThe website allows you to load images individually by clicking on them, it goes well with the title :)
- Syonyk 4y agoIndeed! I just ran it through the inspector, it only transfers 257kb in the initial load! Impressive! The images are super tight, too. Buuut, it loads the "Two girls sitting on couch" image even though it doesn't display it by default.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoI also bet that using less performance oriented languages like Php, Ruby, Python in the datacenter instead of Rust and C++ also has a huge Carbon footprint. Honestly, the only way forward to really fight climate change is to decouple carbon from power generation. Everything else is just wasting time re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That means we need to be all in on zero emissions power generation (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear) as well as conversion of combustion engines to electric (see electric cars).
- jeffbee 4y agoDatacenter energy usage is irrelevant to our global situation. A large cloud datacenter uses a similar amount of power as 1 large aircraft. All U.S. datacenters combined consumed about 1% of U.S. electric power, meaning they constitute much less than 1% of all energy demand. And despite the fact that cloud capacity has exploded in the last 10 years, electric power consumption of datacenters has barely increased, because the cloud is so dramatically more efficient than other datacenters.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agosource? Bitcoin network allegedly uses as much electricity as Argentina based on headlines (and... those are headlines). Yes that's global, but still.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoI'm not sure of the source (as I'm not the parent), but I wouldn't classify crypto farms as "datacenters". They have very low needs in terms of bandwidth and reliability. Many of them are barns on consumer ISP connections filled with bare mobos sitting on pieces of cardboard, or other similar arrangements that are presumably OK given the economics of crypto, but wouldn't be sellable even as cloud compute for most purposes in the current market (it might be OK for batch-type stuff that doesn't involve tons of transfer -- some kinds of scientific workloads like Folding@Home maybe?).
- Peanuts99 4y agoHow can all US data centers make up 1% of US electrical power and at the same time only use the same amount of energy as 1 large aircraft?
- jeffbee 4y agoEach.
- mellavora 4y ago(see electric cars^h^h^h^hbikes). There, fixed it for you.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoGiven how many cars exist globally, I do wonder where 100's of Kgs of batteries per car is going to come from. A bike requires much less and indeed most people could get by with one so I'd like to see more of this too. But it doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator of population use cases, it doesn't signal wealth, and convenience is king. So I don't think it will come about.
- kornhole 4y agoMy friends are surprised when I show them my little raspberry PI on which I have running two social media instances, two search engines, Nextcloud, XMPP, email and some other services for a dozen people. I explain that my services don't have any advertising, blockchain, surveillance, or data mining which massively reduces the amount of resources needed. We are all in the same town which shortens the data transfers. My phone also stays powered for days since it is using primarily my local services and no Goopple. This is a secure, private, and lower carbon solution I hope more people employ.
- Le_Dook 4y agoDo you have any write-up about your setup? I've been interested for a while in self hosting myself at home, but things like security and such are quite confusing and conflicting at times, I find.
- kornhole 4y agoHere is a guide I hope helps get you started: https://growyourown.services/ https://growyourown.services/ I am using https://yunohost.org https://yunohost.org, but https://pibox.io/ https://pibox.io/ looks like a cool setup that takes care of some of the more difficult things such as tunneling and backups.
- Le_Dook 4y agoThat's amazing! Thanks so much for sharing
- morbia 4y agoI'm not totally convinced tracking/data mining is the key distinction here. I'm going to assume your dozen users are friends/family and 'well behaved'. Global cloud services do not have that luxury. They have to deal with wide ranging usage, sophisticated attacks, bots etc that you simply don't have to deal with. In short, they have a vast set of requirements you don't have, each one of which adds complexity. Dont get me wrong, I definitely agree with your message. However I think we need to be clear that a raspberry pi running some services is not the equivalent of cloud services without 'advertising, tracking etc'
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoI cannot imagine the sheer amount of energy wasted by a whole bunch of NPM packages running on my phone...
- criddell 4y agoMaybe there should be a carbon tax on an app's typical resource usage once they have more than a million users. Microsoft, for example, has how many hundreds of millions of Teams users? If anybody has the knowledge and resources to build an efficient application, it's Microsoft. But instead, to save pennies per user, they build with Electron and waste a huge amount of energy.
- horsawlarway 4y agoIn all seriousness - there are already taxes on exactly this in many countries, and even the US has considered carbon taxes on this. The big secret? Electricity costs money, and is taxed. Basically - why fucking bother with trying to measure and assess these applications when there are already measurements on the root consumption - electric power. Long story short - it's a pretty useless thing to be focused on - it costs well under $5 to charge a smartphone for a year's worth of usage. There are simply much, MUCH more impactful changes we could be focused on. This is a waste of time.
- kornhole 4y agoAnd how many people have or will have handsets in the near future? If it is 3 billion people and we can reduce the power consumption by 25%, it would be a lot. Reduction in data center usage of power is the other part. $5 a year of electricity per phone sounds low, but maybe you can share where you got that number?
- systoll 4y ago$5/year is an extremely high estimate. A phone with a 5000mAh battery (more than any iPhone) takes about 20 watt hours of power to charge. Charging it from empty to full each day would use about 7.3 kWh per year. Electricity costs about 15c per kWh.
- xnx 4y agoThis reminds me of the obscure campaign to change the Google homepage background to black to save electricity. There are much higher value things to spend our time and attention on.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoIt’s not the biggest waste in the world, but it’s a particularly galling one. “You want to spy on me, use my data cap, use my battery, and generate CO2? No thanks.”
- jeffbee 4y agoBlack is a high power state for LCDs.
- always2slow 4y agoNot for OLEDs. I just tested my LG C1, 64 watt difference between full screen black #0000000 and full screen white #FFFFFF at 120hz
- Dma54rhs 4y agoWhat was the difference?
- always2slow 4y ago64 watts?
- scrollaway 4y agoThe campaign referenced by GP is very old. It dates from before OLEDs. LCDs were the most common screen type and CRTs second most common at the time.
- Melatonic 4y agoHow much does it draw in total before / after? Curious how much of a percentage change this is
- lotu 4y agoThey say that this is 3-8 Metric tons of carbon per year. For comparison a 747 flying from New York to London one way emits 500 Metric tons of carbon. Europe is emitting around 2 BILLION Metric tons of carbon per year. I personally don't think this is an effective use of resources if our goal is to stop climate change.
- hgomersall 4y agoThey're measuring in Mega Tonnes, not metric tons.
- tines 4y agoGP needs to fix their comment, it's completely inaccurate and presents to people who don't read the article an entirely wrong conclusion.
- kornhole 4y agoI agree that we should focus on the major uses of power, but the trajectory of computing and data center usage is accelerating quickly. We have the opportunity to get ahead of it rather than try to rip out and replace later as we are doing with power plants and transportation, all very costly.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago747 maximum takeoff weight is 320 tons. Even assuming it is entirely made of carbon and it is all burnt (helluva flight for the passengers!), it won't make another 180 tons of carbon appear out of nowhere. I am not even close to trusting your statement. Dial back the hyperbole.
- medv 4y agoCarbon-live.
- Arrath 4y agoWhile 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.
- asdff 4y agoWhat 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.
- Arrath 4y ago> 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.
- asdff 4y agoThe 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.
- kleiba 4y ago"Unwanted" only by the user.
- philipkglass 4y agoThe full report is here: https://groenlinks.nl/sites/groenlinks/files/2021-09/CE_Delft_210166_Carbon_footprint_unwanted_data-use_smartphones.pdf https://groenlinks.nl/sites/groenlinks/files/2021-09/CE_Delf... I don't believe their numbers. They say that data use over wi-fi consumes 150 watt-hours per gigabyte transferred, or 220 watt-hours per gigabyte when including the energy used in data centers. Downloading Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, at 250 GB [1], would consume 37.5 to 55 kilowatt hours depending on whether you use the lower or upper figures. That's more energy than you need to fully charge a Nissan Leaf. Watching 8k video on YouTube can transfer up to 22.5 GB per hour [2]. At 220 watt-hours per GB transferred that implies 4,950 watts of power -- comparable to running a large air conditioner or an electric oven. If data transfer really had these huge power demands, you'd see electrical brownouts whenever a hot new streaming series debuts. When I've investigated reports like this before, the flaw of the methodology is usually something like: 1) Take a well-sourced megabits-per-watt study of networking equipment that somebody published long ago -- say, in 2003. 2) Measure today's data consumption. 3) Multiply the 2022 data consumption number by the 2003 energy intensity number. Get a huge result. Figuring out what happened in step 1 can be difficult because of indirect citations. A current paper will cite "Davy, 2018" but you look at the Davy references and it's getting numbers from "Smith, 2012" while Smith sources from "Chu, 2008" and Chu finally references the person who measured it: "Graham, 2003." [1] https://gamerant.com/pc-games-file-size-hd-space-biggest-huge/ https://gamerant.com/pc-games-file-size-hd-space-biggest-hug... [2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-use-964560/ https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-...
- jonas21 4y agoYeah, many things in the report seems a bit off. Like they assume everyone uses the same amount of data regardless of what kind of network they're on. So since 5% of users are on 2G networks, they assume 5% of total data is transferred over 2G (which is ~400x less efficient per byte than 5G). > The EU average energy consumption of data traffic depends on the distribution of mobile networks used for cellular data traffic. The Ericsson mobility report also provides information on the type of smartphone subscription. This data is summarised in Table 3. We make the assumption that the distribution of the total data-use over the different mobile networks is the same. According to their numbers, 2G would account for nearly two thirds of total mobile energy use, which probably should've made them question their assumptions.
- kornhole 4y agoAnother bonus of turning off these advertising activities on phones and networks is that people are not as manipulated into buying more crap they don't need. Mass consumerism is a major cause of CO2 production.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dools 4y agoI wonder if the respondents understood the consequences of disabling advertising. Like was the question “do you want to pay to use Kwazy Kupcakes, lose access to Kwazy Kupcakes, or allow Kwazy Kupcakes to show you ads?” or was it just “Should Kwazy Kupcakes be allowed to spy on you?” Because I have a hunch it would be far fewer than 60% if they understood the consequences of destroying the revenue model of their shitty free to play games they use to numb their brains at every available opportunity.
- wmf 4y agoTax carbon and move on. These (inaccurate) calculations and the resulting guilt trips are the real waste of resources.
- phpthrowaway99 4y agoIsn't the cost of electricity basically that, or do you mean increase the price to where it actually hurts hard to even exist?
- xnx 4y agoCurrent electricity pricing treats the cost of dumping the waste products (carbon dioxide, and worse) into the atmosphere as an externality.
- Tycho 4y agoMy work MacBook Pro had been running hot for months. Whenever I check the app power consumption it would list Chrome, but I felt that was to be expected. Eventually I got curious and looked at the Task Manager within Chrome to see which of the many tabs was actually using a lot of CPU/memory/energy. Turns out this niche Scottish ancestry website, with a mostly-text layout and a 1990s advertising banner was hogging almost an entire core, constantly, in the background. And this had been going on for months!
- wildrhythms 4y agoEvery web developer and designer should be forced to experience their site on a low-power Chromebook or rPi before they can launch it. In an ideal world, web browsers would enforce some reasonable runtime memory cap (let's say 5MB for now) and CPU limit on websites, and users must give permission for the site to break the cap. Or perhaps a search engine that establishes some reasonable resource caps and de-ranks websites that break the cap.
- kramerger 4y agoI think this is a great idea. At the same time, a lot of pages are still broken in Firefox since they introduced tracking protection 2-3 years ago. So I don't see devs fixing, or users caring enough about this issue to cause a change in devs attitude.
- Kuinox 4y agoLot of web devs know their website is slow but can't do anything about it, they don't choose where to spend time, the manager do.
- Tycho 4y agoMaybe we can force Google to do this through ESG activism.
- r00fus 4y agoSo I wonder how much that text-mostly website consume without the Ad banner (ie, content blocked).
- slim 4y agoI installed Lineage os on my phone and now my battery lasts four days (it lasted only one day before)
- Cryptonic 4y agoPlease take care with using the word "Carbon Footprint", it was invented by the advertisement company Ogilvy for a BP public relation disinformation campaign to draw away responsibility from companies and hand it over to individuals in 2005. - Everytime the term is used, someone thinks he can make a difference, while he cannot as long as the fossils are still digged up to,the meat industry grows and grows, concrete is used on bigger and bigger scale each year and so on. Other than that, good article. Data Transmission should definitely be fueled with low carbon emitting energy sources or avoided if possible. But I'm not sure if 30x 8GB DVDs plus packaging and logistics would be a better way to distribute Call of Duty. Why do all the fun things have a downside? Meh
- Overtonwindow 4y agoA nice comparison would be to bulk mail also known as junk mail in some places. A lot of paper and ink.