Digital Discomfort

While I'd considered myself someone who was fairly deliberate about my online digital choices and the privacy tradeoffs involved, in recent years I'd become quite lazy and just handed off the privacy thinking to Apple. I was all in on Apple product, iPhone, MacBook Pro, Apple Watch, even Air pods. I always had this niggling discomfort in the back of my mind however, but it was easily suppressed.

The discomfort increased with the Epic lawsuit. It was lack of control, why were two corporations going to courts to fight over what I do with my device? Why were suits in Cupertino making a decision about my life? Sure, using an iPhone enables a lot, but the fundamental question remained on my mind, "Whose device is this?".

That was answered with Apple's CSAM scanning. My device was now firmly out of my hands and was now capable of ratting me out to authorities. Practically this has no real bearing on me, as I imagine it wouldn't impact the law-abiding 99.99999% of people using these devices. The question still was, whose device is this?

I don't even want to attempt to wade into the ethic of the matter, the potential for this system to be abused by authorities or the actual efficacy of the solution, the question is, do I truly own this device? While Apple rolled back this scanning, the fact it has the potential to do this answers my question. It's a resounding no.

Now, I completely understand if holding entirely different views to me, I can genuinely appreciate you either don't care about privacy or even think CSAM scanning is a good thing, but do you really feel it's still your device? Imagine your car tells the authorities when you're speeding? That would be a genuine social good for all, right? But if you were to look at your car again, would it feel like you completely owned that car?

I'm in a very different place technically these days, preferring to use digitally quieter tech (I write this on a lovely Psion 5MX). Maybe I'll write up my changes and how much more comfortable I've felt. My system isn't perfect, but it's definitely better and improving.

Whose device is this?

This is the question, imho. And it is not limited to smart phones. Smart door locks? Cars? Smart house appliances?

I am using a camera for pictures
I am using old fashioned HiFi equipment for music (no, I don't listen to music on the computer or some digital device)
I am sometimes carrying old fashioned binokulars with me
I don't have a smart phone any more.

I'm still alive :-)

I have one more gripe: cloud computing. I posted it over at srht if you are interested.

gemini://ew.srht.site/en/2021/20211101-re-digital-discomfort.gmi

Cheers,

~ew

starbreaker

I'm this close stripping my phone bare and not using it for anything but calls and two-factor authentication.

I don't want to use my phone as a music player any longer; I have a dedicated device for that.

I don't want to use my phone as a camera any longer; I want a dedicated device for that.

I don't want to use my phone for internet, period.

I don't want to use a computer that can't run Slackware anymore, at least not for personal computing.

And, to be honest, I'd much rather do my writing with a nice notebook and a fountain pen, at least at first.

mellita

I have to say, I've been very tempted by the prospect of a distinct, physical music player. I've always been warded off by the cost, though. At least for the time being. As things stand, I'm increasingly obsessed with audio fidelity, so I wouldn't want to carry around anything that wouldn't play beautiful audio (which would further necessitate an expensive headset, too).

starbreaker

I've been happy with my Surfans F20 player. It plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC as well as MP3, and since I encode with "oggenc -q 10" everything sounds good even on relatively crappy headphones. The device actually comes with 2 3.5mm jacks: one headphone jack and one line-out jack for connecting to a stereo system or directly to powered speakers. I got mine for $125.

tatterdemalion

Do you carry your camera and your music player with you all the time? Those are two big blockers for a dumbphone for me. Not the only ones, but the big ones. I've settled, in the mean time, for making my phone less appealing to use:

An Inhabitant of Carcosa: Minimizing phone use (re: All a phone needs to do)

starbreaker

The music player, yes. It's a Surfans F20 and not at all heavy. I'm not carrying redundant devices as often as you might expect because the phone stays in the glove box when I'm out. I only bother carrying it because you could walk a hundred miles without seeing a single public phone where I live.

I don't have a discrete camera yet. Might buy myself one for Xmas so I'm not constantly borrowing my wife's DSLR.

aftergibson

You're exactly where I'm at.

I listen to music on a Minidisc player, iPod for Podcasts, Digital camera for photos. Moved from a Macbook Pro to Ubuntu(though I'd love to test Nixos).

Would love to get to an internet-less phone but still progressing towards that!

starbreaker

TBH, I'd like to ditch my phone entirely. If I can't talk to somebody in person, I'd rather just get email from them — or a hand-written letter.

And I haven't had a Mac since Steve Jobs died (funny how everybody made a fuss over the tenth anniversary of his death but not for Dennis Ritchie's). I've just been using secondhand corporate computers. Been running Slackware 15 on 'em lately, even though that release isn't officially out yet. It's rock solid, though.

dmr homepage at Bell Labs

orkney

Epic is owned by China now, which means China owns Unreal too.

I feel somewhat similarly about software subscriptions for specific hardware, e.g. Tesla Autopilot. All the hardware is there, the code is (probably) there, all locked off by a single boolean flag.

I think human brains aren't good at the concept of "ownership" if it doesn't directly relate to a single physical object.

aftergibson

Definitely, I think we really struggle with it in the digital realm. I suspect a lot of it comes down to, how things are presented to us. For example our data isn't so much in "Files" anymore(especially on iPhone), but accessed through Apps or hosted in the Cloud. It's all bit nebulous for people to truly grasp anymore....

eaplmx

Great point! I agree we are having a bad time understanding the new ways of 'ownership' for this century.

I've researching these days about the ownership of digital stuff, including the noisy trends (DRM, NFT, Free speech, and such).

Wow, it's a deep rabbit hole that colides with the primitive human brain and the perception of modernity when we are being directed by fuzzy algorithms.