[everdrive]

No one likes when I say this but it's really past time to stop doing anything interesting on your phone. Delete all your apps, set it as minimally as possible. Leave it home when you go for walks, and power it off when you go driving or to the store, or whatever.

[pavel_lishin]

For many people, their phone is their primary, if not only, computing and communications device.

[everdrive]

Right, which is why they need to start changing their behavior.

[em-bee]

how? whatsapp, wechat, telegram, even signal, all require a phone to be used.

if i didn't need any of those apps then sure, but unfortunately there is no way around these apps if i want to keep in touch with certain people that are important to me.

[zie]

If you need to use these, set the history retention to like no time. That would help a lot. They could still get the contents from the person you are communicating with, but it would require more work on their part. Humans are generally fairly lazy. If you can get the people you communicate iwth to also turn off message retention, that would help. Then they could tell you talked with Tootie, but not what you talked about, at least from the device(s) themselves.

[iamnothere]

If you “must” use those then keep a phone off in a drawer and turn it on once a day to keep in touch.

If those people won’t allow you to be offline from time to time and aren’t willing to switch communication methods as an alternative, maybe it’s not a symmetrical relationship.

Or use something like Beeper (works on Linux): https://www.beeper.com/

[nhecker]

I'm starting to believe this is [a] way forward. Or maybe an approach which is on a spectrum between <everything I have is on a phone behind a fingerprint and a four digit pin> and <I don't own a smartphone>.

Unfortunately, it's pretty common to only have a smartphone as your sole compute device, and increasingly onerous not to own one at all.

[everdrive]

>Or maybe an approach which is on a spectrum between >increasingly onerous not to own one at all.

Yes, and I think this unfortunately demands a grey area. I'm starting to treat my smartphone more like a work device, and there are a few things I do on it:

- My work's authenticator app is there.

- Unfortunately Signal is tied to smartphone usage.

- Practically speaking, people will expect to be able to send you text messages.

- It's still useful for taking pictures.

- My banking app is on there.

Outside of rare occasions, that's really all I use my phone for. I don't carry it around the house. If I go somewhere with my wife, I don't even bring my phone most of the time. I'm "required" to have it, but in principle it's not even mine. It shouldn't be trusted or enjoyed.