4 ms·
> As it stands, true privacy is relegated to the technologically elite, the truly paranoid, or those that can pay to play. I would love for that to change, but
by Syonyk 5y ago
> As it stands, true privacy is relegated to the technologically elite, the truly paranoid, or those that can pay to play. I would love for that to change, but unfortunately that's the current state of affairs.
Or the broke who can't afford the devices now more and more used against us.
Or those who are willing to forgo the conveniences of such devices in exchange for privacy. Or, simply for the sanity of not having to deal with them.
I'm firmly in the boat of "Could do any or all of those things" - I considered a PinePhone, have a PineBook Pro, could easily do GrapheneOS, and... I'm currently using none of them. I'm using an AT&T Flip IV that I leave at home regularly. If I have some fancy requirement, I can tether a laptop to it.
You start from the assumption that a smartphone of some variety or another is a requirement - and I'll counter that, while it's certainly the default option of modern life, the smartphone is really only a decade old, and there are ways of doing things without it we can go back to - and those things do generally still work.
I'm at a point in my life where both I can be a bit annoying about things like reachability, and, interestingly, I'm hostile enough to tech that people expect me to be a bit weird about things. Nobody was surprised when I showed up with a flip phone - but they were surprised that I still had things like email and Google Maps capability on it (KaiOS). At which point, the gears started turning.
Trying to find a way to de-evil what is looking more and more like a corrupted, user-hostile system through and through doesn't seem worth the time, when one can work towards not requiring people to be in that system in the first place.
- ghaff 5y agoI know someone from school who is a fairly senior manager at one of the FAANGs. He only got a cell phone in the first place because he and his wife adopted and the nanny insisted. I know he has a company-issued smartphone now. Don't know if his personal phone is a smartphone by now or if he's still using a flip phone of some sort.
- Syonyk 5y agoThis is another thing rarely talked about that's quite common - people really high up in the tech companies don't use the stuff. Remember, when Steve Jobs' biographer asked him what his kids thought about the iPad, his response was, "They haven't used it." You're more likely to find the "cellphone free" group among high level tech execs and such. Why is that? It's worth pondering. I know more and more people, deeply in tech professionally, who are opting out of it in their personal life, across the board. They know what it can do, they've seen it, may have worked on older versions of it, and simply want no part of it anymore.
- ghaff 5y agoThe main answer is probably that they don't need to. They have personal assistants and admins who deal with their appointments, their email, etc. And, believe it or not, some of them really do unplug when they go on vacation. In a former life when internal company email was becoming a thing, there were execs at my computer company that made one of these minicomputer-based office productivity systems who had their admins print out their email, they'd write responses by hand, and have the admin send the response.
- tharne 5y ago> This is another thing rarely talked about that's quite common - people really high up in the tech companies don't use the stuff. This is true, kind of like how most drug dealers don't do drugs themselves.
- fragmede 5y agoI know I'm personally burnt out on tech by the end of the day from working on it all day, and I'm not "really high up in tech". But also at the end of the day, if I'm not making dinner, then it's DoorDash. If I need a ride somewhere, I use Uber/Lyft. It would be nice to be rich enough to afford a live-in chef and a driver instead of those two apps. I'm not (yet), but it becomes far easier to eschew technology if you aren't forced (no matter how gently) to have any of it.
- ghaff 5y agoI find smartphones mostly useful when traveling. I've never used DoorDash and maybe use Uber/Lyft a half dozen times a year and essentially never locally. Being able to receive texts is increasingly difficult to opt out of for various purposes but you don't need a smartphone specifically for that.