Researchers at Trinity College Dublin, lead by Professor Doug Leith did a report to determine if Airplane Mode in #GrapheneOS and other devices actually disabled cellular. It doesnt have any cellular transmissions.
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/airplane_mode_report.pdf
There is a radio activity spike at the 2.4GHz band, this suggests Wi-Fi activity and is different from cellular network activity.
All credit to Doug here: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/
In the meantime we could look in the future how to disable this spiking even when WiFi is disabled on bootup.
This indicates that the Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth radio creates a frequency spike when it's enabled which does not imply it's transmitting anything, and if it was it would almost certainly be a randomized scan which should be possible to detect.
What we've said is that disabling cellular keeps it off during boot due to how it's initialized. We haven't looked into or talked about Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth. If people are concerned about it potentially doing a Wi-Fi scan at boot, we can look into it, but those scans don't enable tracking. If you're hiding from a eldritch horror attracted by radio waves then that could matter. We can look into that and likely stop it but it doesn't mean there's any general privacy issue caused by Wi-Fi/Bluetooth initialization right now.
Would be interesting to see an analysis over a couple of hours in airplane mode.
I don't really understand why they only measured with the door open and then didn't test the difference with the door closed.
In either case, a good read.
I'm fine with them measuring longer periods of time including over a day. I assume they have other work taking their attention as they are a professor, but I openly invite them or anyone else with the facilities to do the same.
We would like to see airplane mode enabled on first launch
Also we're pretty sure that a recent update caused airplane mode to be disabled after a reboot (pixel 8 pro)
A developer setting to force airplane mode at all times wpuld be great
I second the option to disable celullar at all times in settings.
I fly many times per year and never put on Airplane Mode. I never experienced a crash, so….
