What is the difference between cellular data being used on my phone and cellular data being used on my notebook? Data is data.

    • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      7 months ago

      The phone reports it, yeah, it is creepy. Should be illegal to even have the knowledge to differentiate.

    • dan@upvote.au
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Sometimes it’s based on the TTL of packets. TTL for hotspot clients will be one less than TTL for directly using data on the phone, since the phone is acting as a router, which adds an extra hop.

      I think running a HTTP proxy or VPN server on the phone would mask it (since the connections would then be made by the phone directly), but I’ve never tried.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      7 months ago

      It’s not hard to detect when the standard includes the phone indicating what it’s doing to the carrier.