THEIR OWNERS, NOT SO MUCH……
I have a Cell Phone. It’s not a Smart Phone. It’s just a cheap Flip Phone. No one has the number. I keep it charged up and turned off. This way, if I’m away from home and need to make a phone call, it’s always at full charge when I need it to be. That’s why I own a phone. So I can use it when I need it, not when others want to reach me for their purposes. I have a home phone for that.
Smart phones connect to the Internet, Flip Phones do not. Flip Phones just connect to the phone service you use. In truth there isn’t much difference there and one can be hacked as easily as the other. It’s the uses you put them to.
If you carry a cell phone only to use for really necessary and vital communications, you are safeguarding your life. If you use it to send and receive photos including intimate ones, do Google searches, store passwords, bank accounts, pay bills, record conversations, video events in your life, in short store everything that goes on in your life on your Smart Phone, you are handing over everything there is to know about you to anyone who can gain access to this information, and they can do anything with that information they want to.
Governments can and do gain access to this information.
Governments encourage the ownership and use of Smart Phones. The Chinese Communist Party requires that you have and use Smart Phones and your station and privileges in life are determined by your Social Score, which itself is determined by what’s on your Smart Phone. Our government applauds this Chinese system. Yours does too. Of course. They want total control of your life.
The less you show up as an electronic presence, the less attention you will receive. If you’re a Twitter and Facebook habitue, you no doubt have a bigger presence than you realize and your words continue to expand on the pattern that is you in some mega-computer somewhere, where advanced AI is continually redefining you as benign, a mild threat, an increasing threat, a tax cheater, some sort of criminal, a potential employee, some sort of liability and so on. This sounds like paranoid conspiracy nut stuff right now but it actually isn’t, it’s just not as fully implemented yet as it will be in the future. Just don’t think that none of the above applies to you, because it does. It’s known that our government is keeping track of us with mega-computers, just how far it goes is still secret. But if you look to China as an example of this, they already have it down. If they do, why wouldn’t we?
Smart Phones are like Television. Could you turn off your TV and never turn it on again? We’re easily addicted to anything that makes our lives more interesting or easier and that lets us feel popular and “liked”. Being able to communicate with strangers around the world is pretty heady stuff, to spout off with our opinions in a global forum makes us feel important. It creates the illusion of having lots of friends and dispels loneliness, what’s not to like?
Humans are sheep. Very few of us stray from the flock but the funny thing is, we who do aren’t the ones in the most danger, they are. The wolves aren’t coming for us. Not yet anyway.