Summary In this paper, we critique ICT's current and projected climate impacts. Peer-reviewed studies estimate ICT's current share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at 1.8%–2.8% of global GHG emissions; adjusting for truncation of supply chain pathways, we find that this share could actually be between 2.1% and 3.9%. For ICT's future emissions, we explore assumptions underlying analysts' projections to understand the reasons for their variability. All analysts agree that ICT emissions will not reduce without major concerted efforts involving broad political and industrial action. We provide three reasons to believe ICT emissions are going to increase barring intervention and find that not all carbon pledges in the ICT sector are ambitious enough to meet climate targets. We explore the underdevelopment of policy mechanisms for enforcing sector-wide compliance, and contend that, without a global carbon constraint, a new regulatory framework is required to keep the ICT sector's footprint aligned with the Paris Agreement.

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Concerns surrounding technology use in society has led to the HCI community creating tools for 'digital wellbeing'. These aim to improve users' relationships with technology, but these positively motivated tools may initiate further negative impacts for users e.g. on their privacy or autonomy. Using Pierce's speculative design concepts of 'foot-in-the-door' technologies and focusing on three common digital wellbeing features (time limits and prompts, social 'do not disturb' modes, app and service blocking), I highlight how these tools are a small step away from being used to manipulate users which could enact slow shifts in users accepting such manipulation. Through this and the discussion, I accentuate that positively motivated designs may not explicitly lead to positive interactions by default. I hope this paper will facilitate speculative design and discussion in the digital wellbeing community, to ensure that our designs continue to mitigate negative impacts from technology now and in the future.

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ICT is expected to form 21% of global electricity demand in 2030, and history has shown that efficiency gains in Internet infrastructure aiming to curtail such impacts are far outstripped by the growth in data traffic. We need to reduce demand for Internet connectivity, yet encouraging moderate interactions with digital devices and online services could potentially benefit users. HCI designs have been suggested for moderate interactions and Internet usage, most commonly on smartphones-but it's currently unclear whether these interventions can actually be implemented and tested to understand the user and environmental impacts. In this paper, we review features for understanding and manipulating data traffic in accordance with the stock Android and iOS development libraries to better scope the potential for implementing moderate and sustainable digital experiences. Specifically, we outline the intervention features plausible for Android implementation, and we provide reasoning for why iOS is currently too restrictive. We hope our analysis will break down barriers for researchers interested in this work, or make it easier for them to consider sustainability in their own device or service interventions. We also discuss opportunities for better data traffic consideration in mobile operating systems by 2030. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile devices; • Software and its engineering;

Motivated by mobile devices' growing demand for connectivity, and concern in HCI with the energy intensity and sustainability of networked services, in this paper we reveal the impact of applications on smartphones and tablets in terms of network demand and time use. Using a detailed mixed methods study with eight participants, we first provide an account of how data demand has meaning and utility in our participants' social practices, and the timing and relative impacts of these. We then assess the scale of this demand by drawing comparison between our fine-grained observations and a more representative dataset of 398 devices from the Device Analyzer corpus. Our results highlight the significant categories of data demanding practice, and the identification of where changes in app time and duration of use might reduce or shift demand to reduce services' impacts.

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Internet use and online services underpin everyday life, and the resultant energy demand is almost entirely hidden, yet significant and growing: it is anticipated to reach 21% of global electricity demand by 2030 and to eclipse half the greenhouse gas emissions of transportation by 2040. Driving this growth, real-time video streaming ('watching') is estimated at around 50% of all peak data traffic. Using a mixed-methods analysis of the use of 66 devices (e.g. smart TVs, tablets) across 20 participants in 9 households, we reveal the online activity of domestic watching and provide a detailed exploration of video-on-demand activities. We identify new ways in which watching is transitioning in more rather than less data demanding directions; and explore the role HCI may play in reducing this growing data demand. We further highlight implications for key HCI and societal stakeholders (policy makers, service providers, network engineers) to tackle this important issue.