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Comment by thanhhaimai | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the use case. What would this provides that Airplane Mode doesn't?

The difference between physical and software controls is pretty straightforward. (Closed source) software controls are just asking politely. Physical controls are making it so.

If your threat model includes airplane mode not working as intended, you probably shouldn't carry a phone at all.

Comes down to the model of trust as much as any threat model. I don't need to perceive or even conceive of a specific threat to want to safeguard my privacy, even aggressively if I so desire.

If the threat model includes surveillance capitalism, then the faraday cage is actually a pretty reasonable counter measure.

It blocks nfc, bluetooth and wifi. The last time I checked, airplane mode left those on, and so did the toplevel “turn this radio off” buttons in iOS.

May be but corporate greed for data surveillance occasionally surpasses the needs of state actors so much that they'll voluntarily invent features on the same level.

Google/Apple can in the future announce a "safety" feature that periodically announce Airtag'ish Bluetooth beacons even when in Airplane or powered off mode.

Airplane mode doesn't actually turn everything off, and it's not a guarantee like a faraday cage is. There are instances of devices still actually transmitting "stuff" in airplane mode, or having airplane mode silently disabled. A faraday cage is absolute, assuming correctly constructed, in that it guarantees zero signal can get in AND out. There's no ambiguity (again, assuming correct construction).

Wouldn’t turning the phone off accomplish the same thing?

All of the bags and boxes others have posted make the phone unusable, so turning it off seems just as well. Plus, if you leave the phone on, without airplane mode, in a faraday cage, it’s going to die rather quickly while it searches for a signal.

Believe it or not, no - modern phones are rarely genuinely “off.” iOS has some form of “find my” that still works, I’m not sure where android’s at with it, but “off” and “not transmitting” are genuinely not the same thing at this point.

Airplane mode doesn't turn off wifi or Bluetooth, though obviously you can do that in addition to airplane mode.

Is that an iPhone thing? On Android airplane mode turns off both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Not for my Android phone, at least not by default (Pixel 9a a/ GrapheneOS). It leaves Bluetooth and WiFi on in airplane mode. I doubt this is specific to GrapheneOS and may say more about AOSP.

That's a setting you can tweak with various software.

Not if you were connected to either when turning on airplane mode. Both can also be turned on manually in airplane mode. A physical block avoids any uncertainty or mistakes.

It used to turn them off on the iPhone, but not these days.

A lot of planes have WiFi, and people are also using Bluetooth headphones. So when talking about being a passenger on an airplane, this seems like a rather practical choice.

Right, the airplane icon does not necessarily.

Settings for WiFi, turn off; settings for Bluetooth, turn off; does turn them off.

This change was the result of years of supporting people meaning to turn it off in one place or one day, then confused it didn't work at home or the next day.

So now airplane mode is a conditional off (the state machine across cellular, wifi, and bluetooth is pretty decent at doing a reasonable set of toggles), while the settings are off off.

The near field stuff seems to remain available; full shutdown turns that off too.

In theory, an APT-type implant could keep transmitting even when airplane mode is engaged. This is what Faraday enclosures purportedly defeat.

Certainty?

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