Smartphones Seen As Evil

(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.)

Some writers, like Simon Elmer, have argued that smartphones are the mechanism that government will use to implement a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), digital ID, and other mechanisms of total control over every aspect of our lives. Elmer recommends dumping our smartphones and replacing them with “dumb” phones.

Besides the surveillance and control aspects of smartphones, they are also purveyors of Standard Narrative Propaganda disguised, as usual, as a “convenience”. Digital assistants like Siri, or news apps like Apple News, function as a single source of truth, a kind of digital Jacinda Ardern:

You can get a sense of how this works by listening to how friends who use Apple News talk about the world. Without realizing that they are regurgitating propaganda, they will repeat the nuance-free Standard Narratives about:

• Ukraine
• Covid
• Climate Change
• Racism

These digital assistants, backed by search engines like Google, further enforce the Standard Narratives by censoring and hiding any information that disagrees with these Narratives.

We also know that smartphones report back to their makers and other interested parties about our every move, our every search term, and nearly every other aspect of our use of these devices – again, all in the name of “convenience”.

Phone operating systems like Android and IOS also have the capability of installing surveillance features without the consent of the user. During the scamdemic, Google pushed Covid tracking apps to users’ phones, and we can be sure that this will happen again the next time some “emergency” is declared. Because this mechanism bypasses the control that users should be able to have over the software that they choose to run on their phones, I see this as the most important reason for Simon Elmer’s recommendation that we dump our smartphones.

In theory, we should be able to carry around portable computing devices that cannot be used against us as surveillance and control tools. I’m old enough to remember the early days of PDAs and their merger with phones in the form of devices like the Treo. Unlike smartphones of today, these ancient devices did not report on our every move back to the headquarters of some evil corporation like Google or Microsoft. It is indeed possible to make a smartphone more like an old PDA or Treo, but it requires some extra work. One possible solution is to buy a used Android phone and replace the operating system with a de-Googled operating system like GrapheneOS.

But it’s not just the operating system itself that needs to be replaced. A surprising number of popular apps require network access, and transmit information about your use of the app or the phone itself. So it is important to ensure that these apps are replaced by ones that do not act as covert surveillance systems. For example, you can replace Google Maps with Magic Earth, which allows maps to be loaded onto the device itself, eliminating the need for a network connection.

I’ve been using GrapheneOS for the last six months, and it allows me to use the phone mostly as a disconnected PDA with apps for things like tuning a piano, identifying birds, or recording hikes. I rarely use the device as a phone, and never use it for things like social media or email. Most smartphone users will not be able to wean themselves from these uses of their devices, which means that they must accept surveillance as the cost of “convenience”.

However, even de-Googling a phone does not entirely eliminate the surveillance aspect of smartphones. As we have seen from numerous news reports, the cellular networks themselves can track connected phones with great accuracy. Even when the tracking data is anonymized, government agencies can still determine the identity of phone users by the location and timing information. For example, a phone that returns to the same address every night is most likely owned by someone who lives at the address. If that same phone also travels to GloboCap Inc. every weekday, it is most likely owned by an adult occupant of that home, not a child. This kind of tracking will work with “dumb” phones, not just smartphones.

It’s not enough to work around cell network tracking by using wifi. Google has a huge database of wifi SSIDs that it can use to locate a phone. Think of all the networks that are visible when you enable wifi on your phone (I can see at least six in my semi-rural neighborhood, even though I have wifi disabled on my own home router). It’s easy to imagine that Google could determine your location by correlation with all of those visible networks. Even using an ethernet adapter with your phone (as I do when I need to download something large) may not be able to eliminate the surveillance, because your IP address can identify your rough geographic location.

In short, it’s possible to greatly reduce (but not entirely eliminate) the surveillance aspect of a smartphone by de-Googling the operating system, eliminating network-connected apps, and using it as a phone only in emergencies.