Also, PTSN can be easily eavesdropped as well, and paying by the minute isn't attractive. The phone companies squeezed us long enough.
We're discussing mostly location tracking here (GPS etc), but we also shouldn't neglect the impact of cameras or mics. Nor the way GPS coordinates are embedded in pictures we ourselves take and we ourselves share on Instagram.
Yesterday on TV there was a talkshow about the decline on Facebook due to privacy reasons (with which they seemingly agreed), and someone went how Instagram was the next hottest thing (owned by the same parent company). I wanted to bash my head...
Right now I'm watching Tour de France and the 24/7 in-ears/mics and cameras make it a vastly different game than how it was before the TV era and during the TV but not yet everyone having ears.
* vote into power people that actually care about privacy
* or to only buy products that protect their privacy
what makes you think all this matters?
The average person has decided that life is better for him like this...
The most dystopian tools ever imagined can be perfectly harmless if the people using them don't want to use them for dystopian purposes.
It's only moving towards a dystopy because people don't care or know enough. That's what has to be fixed.
Indeed, I do. You want to track the stores I drive by and what websites I visit? In exchange I can have real-time commnuication with friends all over the world without having to align scheduled to make phone calls of varying connection quality, I can get step by step directions on how to do just about anything including get from point A to B, I can take photos and share them, I can read, I can consume video and audio, I can track my macros, I can get immediate weather alerts, track ODB-II data for my car, get curated news, get raw news, augment my memory with drive/dropbox/evernote, I can track my finances? DEAL!
But at what cost? The software and OS is a locked-down ecosystem for most consumers. The hardware even more so. Such mass adoption forces one to conform in order to participate, meaning even for the privacy-conscious, consumer trends dictate all. Just a couple months ago US carriers were found to be selling realtime customer location data. Whether or not they're selling, they can track your phone via cellular triangulation. The baseband is a proprietary black box that runs its own privileges OS, can read memory and disk, and basically transmits at all times (mandated by law in some countries, for emergency network connectivity) to whoever picks up the signal, and this includes a unique IMEI. No removable batteries, and no hardware switches means masses of phones are being tracked at all times from point A to B, whether or not for nefarious purposes. Add the ever-growing trend of cashless transactions, OS-level third-party GPS tracking, and the reality becomes a slippery slope nightmare.
I feel that sentiments like yours, one's where "life" and "phone" are nearly synonymous, are fostering a dangerous future where one is obligated to own a phone else be left in the dust. This is already nearly the case socially, and in some careers also. Literature classics warn of mass surveillance and control, of chip implants under the scalp, but why go there when the populace already wear a tracking device willingly of their own accord, and grow to depend on it ever more?