Practical Privacy and Sustainability Hacks

Source: Dev.to

Why do developers, admins, and managers love the cloud? Because it scales, and you don’t need to pay for unused resources (at least in theory). So, why don’t we behave accordingly in the office and at home?

Turn it off when you don’t use it!

The post’s cover image is an ironic oversimplification of a scalable sustainable “green IT” concept, betraying its age by the outdated docker‑compose syntax with a hyphen, and its naivety using down instead of stop. Docker containers are lightweight and idle by design, but the same might not apply to services running in those containers and thus on the host machine—your computer. Turning off lights at night and reducing heating to a minimum room temperature on weekends might seem obvious. Standby power adapters with a single LED might cause light pollution but usually don’t waste significant energy anymore.

Background processes and telltale traffic

What about other apps running unnoticed in the background, like music streaming or a chat client? Web apps in the browser, unlike native mobile apps, constantly poll for new information, causing unnecessary network traffic, consuming energy, bandwidth, and costly bills while providing metadata to large platforms and their partners. Spotify’s web player defaults to playing videos even when running invisibly in a background tab.

Smart configuration

A simple, dev‑like strategy to reduce distraction and network traffic is to map unwanted traffic sources to localhost and discard unneeded log files by pointing them to /dev/null. On a laptop or desktop this is as easy as editing the /etc/hosts file with sudo or admin permissions.

# /etc/hosts
127.0.0.2   adform.net criteo.com cas.criteo.com

The above line stops receiving responses from certain advertising services without installing an ad‑blocker extension. Note that this might violate the terms of service of websites that rely on sponsored ads, and /etc/hosts does not support wildcards, so each subdomain must be listed explicitly.

Prevent unhealthy social‑media behavior

Addiction to social media often manifests as doomscrolling. You can replace this habit with more useful activities (learning a new language, knitting, gardening, exercise) or use apps that restrict screen time, limit online access, or switch the display to black and white at night.

Silent watching is common; allegedly about 85 % of users watch influencers dance with muted sound ¹. Music‑streaming clients often do the opposite, running videos in background tabs.

Music‑streaming services receive criticism for unfair artist compensation, biased algorithms favoring paid partners and generative‑AI creations, and opaque financial practices. Users have limited leverage, but many services now offer a private listening mode.

Lighten Spotify’s ecological footprint

Spotify defaults to playing videos (the “Canvas” feature), wasting energy and potentially exposing disturbing images to children. Turning off Canvas disables these looping visuals unless you explicitly request them. Canvas is a per‑client setting, so you’ll need to disable it on each new device.

How to disable Canvas in Spotify

Additional ways to reduce Spotify’s impact:

• Save playlists for offline playback to avoid unnecessary network traffic.
• Use an old‑fashioned MP3 player or simply sing aloud while working (if appropriate for your environment).

Prevent unsolicited AI overviews

Artificial agents and chatbots often generate lengthy answers nobody asked for, leading to “TL;DR” reactions. Search engines sometimes prepend unsolicited AI summaries, wasting tokens, computational resources, and energy.

Ecosia, a more ecological and privacy‑focused search engine that uses Bing in the background, lets you turn off AI overviews and remembers the preference for anonymous guest users within the same browser.

When searching Bing for a similar setting, an AI overview appears without an obvious opt‑out button, stating that you can hide Google AI overviews by configuring Chrome or any mobile browser to use the web tab for Google searches.

Opting out of unhelpful implementations

If you prefer not to use AI on your mobile device at all, the only viable options are to disable, hide, or opt out of AI features wherever possible. This may involve adjusting settings in individual apps, using alternative services, or employing system‑level restrictions.