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by bh42222 5272 days ago
So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society.

That is it right there.

The only answer is the same technology without the bad side of it.

Mobile phones that do not track you, that governments can not track.

A Facebook alternative like Diaspora, except much better and as popular as Facebook.

We are not going to quit mobile phones and social media, but we have to strip their bad side from them. That may involve non-profit mobile phone manufactures, open source social media, who knows exactly what. But I know that technologically it is possible, now we have implement it and use it.

1 comments

> Mobile phones that do not track you,

> that governments can not track.

The pragmatist in me wants to call that a pipe dream. Phones that work on the cell system that don't track you are an oxymoron. It would require a ground up reimplementation of phones. The best case I can see is burner sim cards for smartphones with all the data encrypted and some non-skype popular voip platform. Even if someone built all this you'd still be tracked while you used the phone.

You could start talking about mesh networks or public free wifi to improve some of those problems but any technically realistic solution relies on government supporting things they inherently dislike and popular support for "terrorist helping" technology (which the public doesn't care about until a local power group starts using surveillance to kill/torture a lot of them)