💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20181125 captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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Some great phlog entries lately. I have enjoyed losthalo's
book discussion[1], and krixano and cpj's reflections on the
nature of truth[2], among others.
I have been thinking about smartphone privacy over the last
few days. It's not the first time. I've read some of the
comments around the phlogosphere on the issue. Some of you
are clearly concerned too[3]. Some don't have smartphones.
Others use alternative ROMs, stick to open source software,
and lock their devices down as much as possible. And, of
course, I have read the opinions of those on the web who
say, "Why would I care? I have nothing to hide." I really
don't have anything to hide either. But I care that I am
voluntarily becoming a part of a surveillance-industrial
complex -- a development that is a very unhealthy thing.
It makes sense that we would be drawn into and made
complicit in a system like this via something that we really
like: mobile computing and communications. I grew up in the
late 1970s and early 1980s and when I scoured the Radio
Shack catalogs, all I really wanted was a walkie talkie --
one of those CB devices with multiple channels. How cool
would it be to communicate with your friends like that?
Later, I was totally taken in by Palm devices. They made it
much easier to stay organized and it was quite a luxury to
be able to take the morning news with you (I still miss
Plucker Desktop!). The smartphone is a combination of the
two, of course. It's the lure and I'm the fish. Google gets
to constantly collect data on me and I let them because I
want the product.
I recently read a study outlining how much data the
average smartphone collects on a regular basis[4]. I don't
want to be part of that. The spectre held over us for
generations has been Orwell's Big Brother. What we didn't
know was that we'd be the ones inviting Big Brother into our
lives and that Big Brother exercises his influence in much
more subtle and imperceptible ways than Orwell foresaw[5].
I'm reminded of that line in The Lost Boys movie: "Never
invite a vampire into your house." I'm guilty. I've invited
the vampire into my house.
So at this point I have a few options. There's a new,
privacy-oriented open source Android distribution called /e/
OS[6] that I could install on my current Android phone.
Or I could revert back to a device with a dead OS that
doesn't call home to Apple or Google on a regular basis and
use it as a feature phone. I have a BlackBerry Bold 9900 and
an HP Pre3 in my drawer, among several other devices
abandoned by their makers (I may have a small problem). I
don't really like the former option because it relies on
Google's Android project. What I really want is a pure Linux
(or UNIX or BSD) phone. I suspect that day is not too far
off. It can't come soon enough. Where is my damned Debian
phone? It better not be a slackphone. I can't do dependency
resolution on the fly ;) Until then, I may be digging back
into the old device drawer.
[1] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7elosthalo/nusuth/nusuth-20181123.txt
[2] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7ekrixano/phlog/112318_The_Truth.txt
gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7ecpj/phlog/20181123.txt
[3] See, for example, gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/dumbphone-dilemma.txt
[4] https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DCN-Google-Data-Collection-Paper.pdf
[5] The vapid and uber-conformist social wasteland depicted
in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story seems like
a much more credible end result of our modern technologies.
It's a great book by the way. I highly recommend it.
[6] https://e.foundation/