In a similar vein, I feel like a part of me is missing since google doesn't really work the way it used to anymore. Never in my adult life very often have I needed the answer to something trivial and been unable to find it very quickly. It's extremely unsettling.
Before the days of Google, I used "Ask Jeeves" which recommended search queries be submitted in the form of a question. Even after switching to Google decades ago, I have kept that approach. But despite so many saying that Google isn't as good as search as it once was, that isn't my experience. Curious, do you enter your searches as a question ?
If you enter your searches as a question all you get are Quora and WikiHow links, which are two of the worst websites in existence when it comes to finding useful information.
Besides that's not how search term indexing works.
I do occasionally get twinges in the exact place on my leg that my phone vibrates against when it's in my pocket, even when my phone is in my hand. It's quite unsettling.
> 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.
That'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.
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".
> 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!)
I think you have the right mindset about the most ideal approach, but how-to guides on how to do this *such that* it is only *a few days every few months* to maintain a setup like that are few and far between... as in there aren't any.
Sure - same page, digital sovereignty isn't free, if you want it have to work for it.
But, speaking as a technical securtiy user myself, and have worked with ghidra, I have zero context on how to take the approach you call for that cleanly strips out the bad stuff without buying me, what would feel to be likely, hours upon hours of troubleshooting dependencies for core functionality that I inadvertantly broke due to the surgery... such that I'm back to not carrying a smart device or being ok with a fliphone traingulating me.
One approach I have thought through with effective (I think? still considering this) privacy outcomes is leveraging LLCs and related device plans as a "cloaking" mechanism. If my current phone stays at my house always, I travel locally with a fliphone, and travel with a network of smart phones under LLCs, that could be enough to throw off the tracking effectively while only (maybe?) exposing data that's already exposed in public records.
I don't get nearly enough benefit from a smartphone to bother with any of that sort of deep aggressive reverse engineering and patching. It's not worth the time. I don't have a spare "few days every few months" that I want to dedicate to reverse engineering apps that are purpose built to work against my will.
> 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.
Except there are far easier to use options that aren't nearly so locked down, should I want to do general purpose computing. I think the most recent game console I owned was a Wii, but I treated it largely as a fixed purpose device that did a few things well.
I generally move around with my flip phone in airplane mode, then shut down (airplane mode saves state across power cycles, so I can power it on if I want to take a picture of a flyer for some event without having it ping out). But I'll ask for a citation on "Pinging towers while powered off." I'm aware of some attacks on devices that fake a poweroff, but based on "battery state of charge when powered down" analysis (which admittedly isn't very deep), I've seen no evidence of any sort of substantial power draw when shut down - and some of the places I go, there aren't any towers nearby, so it would have to try fairly hard to reach one.
But I'm really not sure of how much of your high effort spitball here is actually things doable, or if you assume I've got the time to fully reverse engineer a modern device to, say, scramble the IMEI in the baseband (it seems like the sort of thing there wouldn't be a command to do, so that implies remote code exploits in the baseband to be able to add that capability).
Observationally people are truly addicted to them. I sometimes forget to bring mine but I'm an older millennial so I still remember our rotary phone lol.
A few days ago at the bakery I just walked in because the door was open and they were like "we don't open until 9" oh sorry I forgot both my phone and my watch.
FWIW, people were reporting phantom cellphone-like vibration perceptions well before smartphones, and before using them heavily.
I think I felt it at least a couple times when not carrying my circa 2000 Ericsson dumbphone (maybe "https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t18s-116.php"), though I'd hardly used it, probably most days had zero received calls or SMS.
I used to get this with pagers. I think it was originally coined as "phantom paging", but that could just be how I remember it. I don't think I've ever had the sensation since I started using cellphones.
interesting work, but not sure how truthful it is - a cigarette habit does not make one an unstoppable NicotiNator, a smartphone addiction does not make one a cyborg.
Cigarette addiction is the only thing powerful enough to ensure my elderly housemates get exercise (up and down the stairs) and sunlight, all while they do that deep wheezing smokers cough proclaiming that they should quit one of these days.
The are definitely some kind of human hybrid, with basic brain functions hijacked by something else. Though perhaps an analogy to an insect zombifying fungus would be more apt than to a cyborg.
Meanwhile, the Hackernews proceeds to spend the rest of his day taking amphetamines and mindlessly scrolling like the dopamine junkie he is, all while feeling smugly superior to the lowly nicotine addict, which he compares to an insect that was infested by a parasitic fungus and turned into a mindless zombie. The microplastics in both users' brains and testes breathe a sigh of relief.
In a similar vein, I feel like a part of me is missing since google doesn't really work the way it used to anymore. Never in my adult life very often have I needed the answer to something trivial and been unable to find it very quickly. It's extremely unsettling.
Before the days of Google, I used "Ask Jeeves" which recommended search queries be submitted in the form of a question. Even after switching to Google decades ago, I have kept that approach. But despite so many saying that Google isn't as good as search as it once was, that isn't my experience. Curious, do you enter your searches as a question ?
If you enter your searches as a question all you get are Quora and WikiHow links, which are two of the worst websites in existence when it comes to finding useful information.
Besides that's not how search term indexing works.
Have you tried Kagi? It's not "peak Google", but at least I don't miss it so much anymore.
I do occasionally get twinges in the exact place on my leg that my phone vibrates against when it's in my pocket, even when my phone is in my hand. It's quite unsettling.
> 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.
No 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
That'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.
OsmAnd is what I'm using now, since the quality of Google Maps navigation for me has fallen off a cliff.
> 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".
> 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!)
I think you have the right mindset about the most ideal approach, but how-to guides on how to do this *such that* it is only *a few days every few months* to maintain a setup like that are few and far between... as in there aren't any.
Sure - same page, digital sovereignty isn't free, if you want it have to work for it.
But, speaking as a technical securtiy user myself, and have worked with ghidra, I have zero context on how to take the approach you call for that cleanly strips out the bad stuff without buying me, what would feel to be likely, hours upon hours of troubleshooting dependencies for core functionality that I inadvertantly broke due to the surgery... such that I'm back to not carrying a smart device or being ok with a fliphone traingulating me.
One approach I have thought through with effective (I think? still considering this) privacy outcomes is leveraging LLCs and related device plans as a "cloaking" mechanism. If my current phone stays at my house always, I travel locally with a fliphone, and travel with a network of smart phones under LLCs, that could be enough to throw off the tracking effectively while only (maybe?) exposing data that's already exposed in public records.
I don't get nearly enough benefit from a smartphone to bother with any of that sort of deep aggressive reverse engineering and patching. It's not worth the time. I don't have a spare "few days every few months" that I want to dedicate to reverse engineering apps that are purpose built to work against my will.
> 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.
Except there are far easier to use options that aren't nearly so locked down, should I want to do general purpose computing. I think the most recent game console I owned was a Wii, but I treated it largely as a fixed purpose device that did a few things well.
I generally move around with my flip phone in airplane mode, then shut down (airplane mode saves state across power cycles, so I can power it on if I want to take a picture of a flyer for some event without having it ping out). But I'll ask for a citation on "Pinging towers while powered off." I'm aware of some attacks on devices that fake a poweroff, but based on "battery state of charge when powered down" analysis (which admittedly isn't very deep), I've seen no evidence of any sort of substantial power draw when shut down - and some of the places I go, there aren't any towers nearby, so it would have to try fairly hard to reach one.
But I'm really not sure of how much of your high effort spitball here is actually things doable, or if you assume I've got the time to fully reverse engineer a modern device to, say, scramble the IMEI in the baseband (it seems like the sort of thing there wouldn't be a command to do, so that implies remote code exploits in the baseband to be able to add that capability).
It's way, way easier to just not carry a phone.
Observationally people are truly addicted to them. I sometimes forget to bring mine but I'm an older millennial so I still remember our rotary phone lol.
A few days ago at the bakery I just walked in because the door was open and they were like "we don't open until 9" oh sorry I forgot both my phone and my watch.
FWIW, people were reporting phantom cellphone-like vibration perceptions well before smartphones, and before using them heavily.
I think I felt it at least a couple times when not carrying my circa 2000 Ericsson dumbphone (maybe "https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t18s-116.php"), though I'd hardly used it, probably most days had zero received calls or SMS.
I don't know how much that's like phantom limb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome
I remember thinking I heard the ICQ "uh oh" message sound.
I used to get this with pagers. I think it was originally coined as "phantom paging", but that could just be how I remember it. I don't think I've ever had the sensation since I started using cellphones.
I have stopped wearing my Apple watch other than for workouts and occasionally get phantom vibrations.
interesting work, but not sure how truthful it is - a cigarette habit does not make one an unstoppable NicotiNator, a smartphone addiction does not make one a cyborg.
Cigarette addiction is the only thing powerful enough to ensure my elderly housemates get exercise (up and down the stairs) and sunlight, all while they do that deep wheezing smokers cough proclaiming that they should quit one of these days.
The are definitely some kind of human hybrid, with basic brain functions hijacked by something else. Though perhaps an analogy to an insect zombifying fungus would be more apt than to a cyborg.
Meanwhile, the Hackernews proceeds to spend the rest of his day taking amphetamines and mindlessly scrolling like the dopamine junkie he is, all while feeling smugly superior to the lowly nicotine addict, which he compares to an insect that was infested by a parasitic fungus and turned into a mindless zombie. The microplastics in both users' brains and testes breathe a sigh of relief.
> a cigarette habit does not make one an unstoppable NicotiNator
I have to disagree with you there.