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> It’s a widely acknowledged but often underappreciated fact that in less than two decades, smartphones have revolutionized most aspects of everyday human life.
by Syonyk 2y ago
> It’s a widely acknowledged but often underappreciated fact that in less than two decades, smartphones have revolutionized most aspects of everyday human life.
Not all revolutions are good... but, yes, this is an entirely fair statement.
> While many readers—and devoted smartphone users—may find this influence troubling, abandoning our devices isn’t the solution.
Yes. It really, really is a perfectly good solution, that needs to be far more heavily used than it is. Don't carry your smartphone. Power it off. Carry a flip phone if you must. Change the default expectation of everyone that you, of course, have a little pocket tracker and will install whatever tracking Apps(TM) you're asked to. It's utterly absurd that I'm now asked at a gas station, when paying cash, if I'm "using the App."
We (the more-tech-aware sorts likely posting here) know what sort of nasty things these devices are up to. Anything that has your location data is constantly streaming it through SDKs up to shady vendors who will package and resell it to anyone with a checkbook, to be able to retroactively root through people's lives for some reason or another. We know how the products are designed to be addictive ("Engaging!") - I guarantee more than a few people around here have "A/B tested engagement modifications."
Yes, in an ideal world, none of this would be a problem. But that's not the world we have right now, and I don't believe that minor modifications of this concept of device can improve the state of it. I've been trying for years to figure out how to make digital consumer tech less-toxic, and the only conclusions I've come to are, "You can't."
So I'm happy to be one of those people who clacks a flip phone when someone asks me to install an app to do something inane - or, better, simply states "I don't have a phone on me." It reminds people that there was life before smartphones - and, experimentally, the reaction I get now, post-Covid, from a flip phone is almost universally, "Wow, I didn't know you could still get those!" - people are very much interested in them now.
- pelario 2y ago> Power it off This has been the real game changer for me. As instant gratification is not so instant, I can go way larger stretches of time without checking the phone. Also, as nowadays most people message, and calls are not so common (at least in my circles), there is no "harm".
- lm28469 2y agoNo notifications of any kind + airplane mode unless I actively need to use it is my way to go for the last few years. gmaps is the last useful thing that tech came up with so I'm not going to entirely give up smartphones, the rest can die I don't care much
- Syonyk 2y agoThat's quite reasonable. You might consider the Open Street Maps clients - OrganicMaps is one I've played with on tablet. That gets you navigational data, but works purely offline and isn't trying to stream your data out.
- XorNot 2y agoOsmAnd is what I'm using now, since the quality of Google Maps navigation for me has fallen off a cliff.
- derefr 2y ago> Yes, in an ideal world, none of this would be a problem. But that's not the world we have right now, and I don't believe that minor modifications of this concept of device can improve the state of it. I've been trying for years to figure out how to make digital consumer tech less-toxic, and the only conclusions I've come to are, "You can't." I don't see what's so hard about it. Root your (Android) phone; throw any app you want to use into Ghidra and strip out all but the desired functionality. Presuming you only need a few key apps, it would take maybe a few days every few months to keep it going against updates (or less if you can come up with dynamic-library-shim approaches to modding, instead of using binary patching.) In other words: rather than waiting for an open-source mobile ecosystem that'll never come, we should just be treating mobile devices like we do game consoles: seeing them as something to be jailbroken, modchipped, hacked, brute-forced, overridden, key-extracted, etc. Made to do what you want, and only what you want, when you want — source-availability be damned. It's not a solution for everybody, but it can be a solution for those who know how to do it. (And if there were a thriving ecosystem of people doing this work, then the work itself could be repackaged for cargo-cult consumption by those who don't really understand it, but are willing to follow a "modding guide" or pay to have it done by some guy on eBay.) --- I should note separately that if you're concerned about being tracked, a flip-phone is still a terrible thing to carry around (if you're carrying it with the battery + SIM card both in it, which I assume you are.) Cellular carriers are 10x as nosy (and state-actor-infested) as the average app company. Cellular baseband chips will still be passively pinging nearby radio towers with the phone's IMEI and the SIM card's ICCID, even while the phone is "off" — as long as its battery isn't dead/removed. Smartphones can't prevent their baseband chipsets from pinging towers any more than flip-phones can, of course — but at least if you're using a smartphone with only an eSIM, then (on a jailbroken device) you can at least install a background service that will have the application processor tell the eSIM chip to present itself as unpopulated whenever the phone is locked; and perhaps send a command to scramble the baseband's configured IMEI right before telling it to go to airplane mode, too. (I presume here that you would be willing to trade off being unreachable by calls except when "ready", for not having your location tracked by the carrier except when your phone is awake + unlocked + being interacted with. You'd still be reachable by text — SMSes get buffered in the receiving SMSC until the subscriber comes back online!)
- 2y ago
- scionthefly 2y agoI miss having a quick toggle to turn GPS on and off. It was on some of my early smartphones. Now I have to dig into the location menu...