It's not just this. This is a major push, certainly, but... as we come up on about a decade of smartphones being more than "that weird nerd phone one person I know has" it's worth stepping back and looking at the benefits and costs.
Where you put these will depend on your view on a lot of the issues, certainly.
But, in the past decade:
- Every interaction with your primary device is now, by default, an opportunity for aggressive data collection, often in ways even the people who write the software don't know (because they rely on tons of other libraries and toolkits that are doing this quietly under the hood).
- The default is now that you use a smartphone for everything, with the desktop experience limited or turned into a crappy version of the smartphone version (Image! Video! Scroll, scroll, scroll, never stopping, always seeing more ads! Text, who cares about that ancient stuff?)
- The default has gone from "If you're alone in a social space, you talk to other people" to "You stare at your phone." Certainly was a trend before, with the Walkman/iPod/etc, but it accelerated dramatically.
- Everything has been turned into either a subscription service, or a "Free-to-play" world in which the goal is addiction and microtransactions.
There are plenty of benefits of smartphones, but culturally we're exceedingly bad at looking at the opportunity costs of new technology, and they're increasingly becoming harder to ignore.
If you can honestly evaluate the device and decide it's a net positive, great. But I know an increasing number of people, myself included, who are evaluating them and saying, "You know, never mind. They're not worth the downsides."
Unfortunately, we’re so far down the path that I no longer have a choice.
I’m starting graduate school in the fall. A few weeks ago, I went in to pick up my new college ID card. The security guard would not let me into the building until I downloaded an app called “Everbridge” on my phone and used it to answer a series of health screening questions (ie, have you tested positive for COVID in the past 14 days).
The app was for iOS and Android. There was no web version. There was no option to fill out a paper form. I was not warned in advanced. But I guess it wasn’t a problem for anyone (including me), because who the heck doesn’t have a smartphone? It’s like having a wallet now—an expected requirement for modern life, even in situations when an analog solution could have worked just as well.
So what would they do if you emptied your pockets out and demonstrated that you did not have a smartphone? You pulled out the candy bar or the flip phone?
Again, I'm at a point where I can be a thorny pain in the ass about stuff like this, but you carrying a smartphone, even though you (presumably?) know it's evil means that people can do things like this - expect you to download some large blob of unknown code that you're going to run.
As long as they don't encounter people who literally can't comply, it's fine. It works for them.
I mean, I would have refused to download an unknown app I'd never heard of, but... if I pull out a clearly-not-a-smartphone, what are they going to make me do? Go down the street to Best Buy, buy a phone, and come back?
They wouldn’t have let me into the building. Yes, I assume they wouldn’t have retracted my acceptance and we would have made some arrangement, but I have better things to deal with in my life. I’m on a (Jailbroken) iPhone, so the app should at least be sandboxed—I’m not entirely sure what I would have done on Android.
I understand not wanting to deal with it, but that's quite literally how we got to this situation in the first place - everyone has a smartphone because everyone has a smartphone.
What if your phone was too old to run the app (which looks like a steaming pile, based on reviews)?
Unless there was something in the application documentation about "owning a modern smartphone and being willing to install random applications as required by the university," I would have plopped right down, pulled out a laptop, and started making phone calls to figure it out.
But, again, I'm at a point in my life where I can be a thorny pain in the ass about stuff like this without any real consequences.
Your rebuttal is, at best, a specific, straw man instance of "If you were doing nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide."
I needn't be holding child pornography to be concerned about a third party viewing my photos, writing, or other media on a device that is just mine and not published, public content.
CSAM is a hash database. The images are converted to a hash and then compared to the hashes of known pornography of children, not directly viewed.
The weirdly less discussed aspect of this is that anyone who is storing their images of any kind on someone else’s computer and network thinks that nothing could have been viewed before. If Apple or Google or Amazon want to scan the data you store with them they could be doing it, so if that was a concern for a person from the get go then they wouldn’t have been storing their data with third parties to begin with.
> The images are converted to a hash and then compared to the hashes of known pornography of children, not directly viewed.
I honestly don't understand why this is a relevant point. It's still surveillance.
> that anyone who is storing their images of any kind on someone else’s computer and network thinks that nothing could have been viewed before
I don't think that's the confusion. I think a huge part of the issue is that the surveillance is not taking place on someone else's computer, it's taking place on your smartphone. Yes, Apple says it only happens if you're uploading to the cloud -- but that's just Apple saying "trust us". If they did the scanning on their computers instead of yours, it wouldn't be necessary to trust them on this point.
That’s true of any software you’d use anywhere if you accept the updates of the creator. Linus Torvalds could accept an update tomorrow that surveils people’s data and YES people might notice but plenty of people just accept updates and move on (if you’ve done code reviews you know how arduous multi-hundred or thousand line contributions can be to review).
My point is we've already been taking the same risks and the only reason it’s something now is because it’s a transparent process. It’s always a “trust us” scenario unless a person routinely scans all software they is and all updates for malicious server calls or some other kind of recording of data and maybe opening of a back door.
Where you put these will depend on your view on a lot of the issues, certainly.
But, in the past decade:
- Every interaction with your primary device is now, by default, an opportunity for aggressive data collection, often in ways even the people who write the software don't know (because they rely on tons of other libraries and toolkits that are doing this quietly under the hood).
- The default is now that you use a smartphone for everything, with the desktop experience limited or turned into a crappy version of the smartphone version (Image! Video! Scroll, scroll, scroll, never stopping, always seeing more ads! Text, who cares about that ancient stuff?)
- The default has gone from "If you're alone in a social space, you talk to other people" to "You stare at your phone." Certainly was a trend before, with the Walkman/iPod/etc, but it accelerated dramatically.
- Everything has been turned into either a subscription service, or a "Free-to-play" world in which the goal is addiction and microtransactions.
There are plenty of benefits of smartphones, but culturally we're exceedingly bad at looking at the opportunity costs of new technology, and they're increasingly becoming harder to ignore.
If you can honestly evaluate the device and decide it's a net positive, great. But I know an increasing number of people, myself included, who are evaluating them and saying, "You know, never mind. They're not worth the downsides."