Why?
So you're saying people shouldn't want nice features?
How are they able to auto-play audio even when my browser is set to block that?
yea that's not how these models work, at all. they don't act autonomously or just take over sentient-like control of everything that runs it, unless you tell it to. and probably wouldn't be able to do that anyway without a lot more information it doesn't have.
IMO The problem isn't so much getting them to know about it, the problem is getting them to care.
I had a similar issue with firefox launched via firejail where I had to pass through the socket file it uses to communicate with.
If it helps anyone, this was my solution:
$ cat .config/firejail/firefox-common.local
include firefox-common-addons.profile
noblacklist ${RUNUSER}/app
mkdir ${RUNUSER}/app/org.keepassxc.KeePassXC
whitelist ${RUNUSER}/app/org.keepassxc.KeePassXC
I don't think pinging is necessary, it could just be temporarily turning off airplane mode when you go to make an emergency call.
But I was moreso pointing out that OP's paranoia over not having a carrier is IMO a bit moot when the baseband is always on, as any tower that's listening could still see them and track them at least by IMEI. There are some portable hotspots that have an IMEI randomization feature, although I would be worried that you could get banned from the network using that if you actually had service.
Airplane mode doesn't necessarily turn off the baseband radio, it can still work even if the application OS isn't talking to it, so you can still be tracked. Also some phones actually have a mux on the camera/mic/GPS so that the baseband can talk to it even if the application OS is shutdown.
So 1 month becomes... 2 years?
I know it's not BSD but, gentoo already does similar with elogind to support all init systems with gnome, so maybe they could use something like that too.