Smartphones, Secrets, and Surveillance: What You’re Not Told
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We take our smartphones everywhere. the first thing we check in the morning and the last thing we check before bed. They monitor our correspondence, calculate our steps, keep our secrets, and connect us to our everyday world. They are in many ways an extension of us.
But behind the glittering interface and omnipresent apps lies a question we are not nearly asking enough.
Just how ethical is your smartphone?
Yes, it is a utility. But, your smartphone is also a passive observer – monitoring and collecting information on our lives in ways most of us do not begin to imagine. Let’s start with the obvious. First, your smartphone is to log everything it can about:
- Where you are and when you are there
- Who you communicate with, how many times a day and the duration of the visit
- What you look at, have purchased, watched and searched
- Even your voice, face and fingerprints
And this doesn’t even begin to take into consideration other functions, especially many apps on your phone that continue to collect information in the background while the app is not in use. In one study from 2022 by Trinity College Dublin, they reported that Android device users had an average of 20 times the information sent to Google while idling than a user of an iPhone!
According to Atlas VPN’s research, 98% of all Android apps share user data with third parties, and 88% of all iOS apps share user data with third parties. That’s not even a side effect. That’s their business model.
Who is Watching You and Why?
When we refer to collecting data, we are actually referring to 3 people: app developers, platform providers, and data brokers.
Developers, particularly developers of free apps, need advertising revenue to exist. So they have every incentive to track user behavior and sell that information to advertisers. Some developers go so far as to sell it to brokers too.
Organizations such as, Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon leverage your data to not only determine ad targets, but also the voice assistance we use (Siri, Alexa, etc); and the more they have, the better predicting users behaviors and making money.
Brokers are companies, buying and selling enormous amounts of personal data and building enormous consumer profiles on you, without you ever knowing it, let alone consenting. In a 2019 U.S. Senate report, one broker claimed to retain up to 3000 data points per individual.
The Trouble with Accepting Terms
It’s easy to say that we choose this. We agree to the terms. We accept the cookies. We hit “Allow” or “I agree”.
But real consent in the maze of privacy policies is just a myth in today’s technological climate. On average, the privacy policy takes more than 17 minutes to read and requires a college educated individual to understand.
More importantly, we seldom have a real choice. Say no, and the app does not work. Simply put, these examples of design – known as dark patterns – exist in the countless web applications that we interact with and implicitly beg us to give far more than we had anticipated.
The Change In Anonymity
You might be saying to yourself, “But they are collecting data points, but it’s anonymous”. If only that were the case.
Research has repeatedly demonstrated that even anonymous datasets can be tracked back to the individual. An MIT study found that with only four points of location data, 95% of individuals could be uniquely identified. A study in Nature Communications showed that almost all people living in America could be uniquely re-identified using anonymized location data. Layer on a few more data points, like device model, time of use, typing cadence, and it becomes almost too easy to identify you without even using your name.
Apple vs Android: A Matter of Degree
In the realm of privacy, individuals almost universally believe Apple is better than Google. In many instances, this is true. Apple has rolled out capabilities like App Tracking Transparency and Mail Privacy Protection and uses means like differential privacy to anonymize as much as possible while still providing value to users. They also take steps, though limited, to restrict third party cookies and reduce app tracking.
However, Apple is still collecting its own data – your App Store activity, Siri queries, iCloud info, etc.
Android is, in theory, more open source but is still reliant on Google services in practice. Those services – Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome – are among the most potent data collection components on the planet. Unless you know how stay opted out, Android phones can send vast amounts of personal information to Google servers.
So yes, there are differences but both of these ecosystems have been designed to extract value from user behavior. There is not good vs evil; there are shades of grey.
Regulations Are Stumbling
As governments are beginning to react to the public’s unease about personal data protection, we see an increase in data protection.
- The GDPR in Europe provides users the right to access, delete and has control over their data.
- California’s CCPA allows consumers to know what data is being collected and to request that it not sold.
- India’s new DPDP Act on the other hand allows individuals more ownership of their digital information.
These regulations are a great starting point, but enforcement is inconsistent and many companies are international (making them essentially immune to the laws of any one country). The result is a patchwork of laws that has many loopholes.
Are Ethical Smart Phones Possible?
Not all is lost. There are a select number of companies trying to develop some devices and services with some focus on ethics.
- Fairphone makes phones with repairable parts, sourced materials responsibly, and tracking limited.
- Purism makes the Librem 5. It runs on Linux, but notably has physical kill switches that disable the microphone, camera, and wireless chips.
- Privacy-first offerings like Signal, GrapheneOS, and DuckDuckGo (with some limitations) give users more control over data collection by third-party companies and where that data goes.
While none of these tools are perfect and come with trade-offs in either performance or compatibility, it does show that alternatives exist (if demand exists).
So, What Can You Do?
While building your own phone or rewriting the global privacy laws isn’t likely, you still have some agency.
Here are a few actionable things you can do in your everyday life:
- Limit app permissions, and especially location, microphone, and camera permissions.
- Delete any apps you don’t use.
- Use privacy-focused browsers and search engines.
- Say no to as many cookies as you can.
- Regularly review your privacy settings and consider if they still match your desired level of privacy.
- Seek out apps and products that make data collection practices clear and transparent.
Above all, ask questions. Be curious. Understand what the costs are of your choices? Your data is worth something – treat it as such.
Conclusion
The smartphone has become the most personal technology of our recent past. But all that closeness has its downsides: every tap, swipe, and scroll, adds to an ever-more-detailed data profile. Whether it’s ethical or not depends on how conscious, informed and in control you are. For now, the balance of power certainly favors companies out there, not users. But maybe that’s not the end of the story. If we demand better design, better regulation, and better choices, maybe one day we are the ones served by smartphones, not the other way around.
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