Yeah, I love my phone and the whole world it opens up, having access to so much information in my pocket. But I also hate how tied we are to them now. I bought tickets for a gig recently and the only way I can access them is by downloading an app (that I’m only going to use for this one gig). What if I didn’t have a smartphone? What if I didn’t want to take a smartphone to a gig? You aren’t allowed to go to this gig without one, and it’s a small thing, but I don’t like how the option is out of your hands.
Pretty much every supermarket in the UK now requires you to download an app so you can access their offers. I hate this so much.
The most ridiculous part are services insisting you install an app when everything their app does could be in a progressive web app. PWAs are less work to develop as they can run on any device with a browser. For fast food and clothing brands especially, I think PWAs are a no brainer. (Unless you want to track your customers coughTimHortonscough)
It’s your last point there. They want you to install an app because said apps can collect a lot more data points on a
foolconsumer than a web app.Decathlon you need a smartphone for their loyalty card. Only upside is you don’t have to get receipts for their 1 year return policy.
In my country (Czech Republic) you can tell them your email address that is tied to your account
My family got a new KitchenAid stove and I wanted to set a stop time for the oven while we went for a walk. I am able to do this on my shitty oven at our apartment.
I had to connect the stove to wifi, download an app, make an account, and link the stove. All to set a timer. Even then of course there was an error linking them.
Usually I wouldn’t have done that but I was really looking forward to the walk. I was one of the first adopters of Hue lights and used to be excited for smart home stuff. But this is so stupid.
Wondering if it’s some sort of data collection thing and also there’s no way a kitchen appliance company focuses on security and making their wifi connected devices secure.
So dumb.
I never buy any appliances with WiFi or any IoT shit, I draw a hard line there. That shit is cancer.
I’m willing to buy smart appliances, but only if they are LAN only and connect to HomeAssistant. No data collection, no privacy policy, no outside access
It’s getting harder not to buy ones tbh
It is pretty ridiculous. They started doing the same thing with app ticket at Red Rocks in Colorado. So I have an ancient android phone I use for that shit now, doesn’t even have a sim card in it. Has the ticket app and I may put a grocery store app on it at some point, but otherwise it’s factory fresh. They can keep their grubby apps off my real phone.
I thought I lost my phone before moving states and nearly burst into tears. It has my insurance, the map, what if something happened to me on the road, etc. It was an awful spiraling feeling. Thankfully I found it, but it was a hard reality check of how much I have tied to this little device.
Yup. Ive spend a lot of time with backups and screenshots of my apps/home screen in case I need to replace it, and I still get weird when I think about it. Years of settings and customization built up, no way I’d be able to get it back 100%.
Why don’t you just back things up through iCloud or Google Drive?
I do, but it doesn’t back up everything. Android just doesn’t have the backup that apple has unfortunately.
Aw, dang. That’s annoying
I run a contracting business and have had straight panic attacks over not being able to find my phone as I’m rushing out the door for the day. I really need to set up an asterisk server and keep my sim cards there but I just don’t have time, nor am I paying a service a ridiculous monthly fee to run it.
Uhm can you explain a little more about the asterisk server and the sims cards. I thought asterisk wasn’t for mobile phones.
I’m trying to remember myself, but I remember reading about a way to feed a sim interface into a digital telephony card for use with asterisk. It was basically like a modem the fed a voip/sip line into the system. This was years ago that I read this and I could be completely misremembering it.
I know Apple is restrictive, like that other guy who commented who likes to apply customizations, but I love that apple products talk to each other seamlessly. I could have gone on through my tablet, except that I don’t pay for it to have its own wireless signal.
That’s actually how I found my phone. My neighbor let me tag on to her WiFi and I used the Find My Phone feature with my iPad. Saved me from a meltdown lol
As someone who grew up before computers and smartphones were commonplace, for the most part you could still life in the same way as you did before computers and smartphones, because all the things you’d need still exist. You’d just be horribly out of the loop of the way modern life functions… But you could do it.
What’s interesting is that pretty much no one wants to live this way any more. It was pretty damn boring a lot of the time.
Yeah but maybe a bit of our problem is people don’t get bored anymore. The feeling of boredom is an important one and we stuff it down with dopamine doping and doom scrolling. When I was a child, if I got bored I went outside, or I saw if my friend could play, or I got a toy out. Once smart phones came along suddenly being bored was just an invitation for Reddit— Lemmy— to fill in the void.
I’m glad that Lemmy is not as addictive as Reddit was. I want to be bored a bit sometimes. Boredom makes me do chores instead of ignore them. Or play with my kid more. Or go hiking.
I don’t imagine 80s kids would have said they had boring childhoods, just because they weren’t completely soaked up with phones demanding their attention 24/7.
My childhood wasn’t boring, but I was bored an awful lot. And I agree, boredom can be a great motivator. But I can’t say that I miss being bored.
This. It destroys real life community and severs local bonds between people. It makes one ungrounded.
To take a step back and think of our parents letting us out of the house to roam where we did without having any way of getting into contact with us is absolutely bonkers to me as a parent now.
I’m having to work on a safety plan for a trade school. There is no good way of establishing communication across campus in the event of a disaster outside of A) Walkie Talkies or B) Cellphones. And honestly I can’t entrust faculty and staff to grab a walkie talkie in such an event. What I can trust is that they’ll have their cellphone on them.
To take a step back and think of our parents letting us out of the house to roam where we did without having any way of getting into contact with us is absolutely bonkers to me as a parent now.
You’ve bought into paranoia. In the US, most areas are far safer than they were in previous generations. Crime rates are largely down from their highs in the 70’s and 80’s. And even the 90’s wasn’t a safe time, by comparison. Even in the 90’s, the whole “stranger danger” crap was so overblown that it probably did far more harm than good. The problem today is that news, both traditional and online are a 24x7 feed of “doom, DOOM, DOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” which give a horribly skewed perspective on how bad things really are. For my own kids, they disappear with the neighbors’ kids for hours at a time, and we’ll call them in when it gets dark. This usually involves either yelling from the front porch (I really wish I could whistle like my mother did. I could hear that whistle a mile off); or, calling around to the various houses until we find them. They don’t have cell phones yet, and probably won’t for a few more years, as they just don’t need them. Also, I don’t want to worry about an expensive electronic device ending up left somewhere or smashed.
Oh no, I agree with you entirely. That’s my point, I know it’s safer than ever and yet I still want that connection. You can call that paranoia, I call it an overabundance of caution for the soul that means most to me. How my parents did it without that connection during a time that wasn’t safe by comparison is amazing to me.
I’m not worried about my child’s safety in terms of other people. I’m worried because I know all the dumb, outright dangerous shit I did as a child and that they are as predisposed as I am.
I’m trying to not spend too much of my time online and I’m going kinda successful on that. But I can’t say the same about living without smartphone. I need it to study through PDFs and reading EPUB books. I’m 31 years old, so I picked a tiny part of the “pre terminally online era” during my childhood. However, I’ve became a sort of internet addict in my teens. I should be avoided it, but it’s a bit to late. Can’t fix the past, but I can fix my future.
A bit of things are harder to do now, without smartphone or especially without computers. I have no idea how this is going in the US, but here (France) there’s been a big push for “all online” stuff, including mandatory administrative tasks. Less digital alternative are still mostly available, but the trend of being able to handle thing without computers is clearly dying. And yes, this means an increasing number of people is lost and can’t do stuff we expect them to do; it seems not enough people care.
And, even outside of that, having a bank account these days can require having a smartphone, more specifically an iOS or Android; the “bank app” being used as an authenticator and required for anything from logging-in on their website to performing money transfers.
We still can operate offline, mostly, but there’s a huge push toward changing that. And I’m not sure there’s a way to make that without leaving a lot of people behind.
Yes we are probably at the tail end of the time where you can still pay with cash, go to the bank branch, handle things at government offices, etc.
I strongly believe we will evolve around the technology we created.
What made sapiens evolution unique was our ability to communicate. We are exponentially increasing that ability.
Relevant meme…
It’s a media art piece by Mark Vomit.
Makes me think of restaurants with QR code menus (been to a couple bars where you have to order through that menu too).
I hate this.
Loads of places just have very poor implementation.
A few weeks ago I was waiting at a counter to order like an idiot for 15 minutes while everyone ignored me until I realised other customers were just ordering with their phones. Just a simple sign saying “please order with your phone” would have done the trick.
Another place I couldn’t figure out what time the kitchen actually opened. Like you could order but the kitchen wasn’t open yet. They just assume you would know something so obvious but it’s not obvious if you don’t know.
Teach them the hard way: replace some of their QR codes to open porn sites
In Brazil, some places also accept payment and offer a QR code on the table to speed up some data input. Some miscreants replaced said QR so the payment would go to their accounts instead.
Had that at a restaurant recently. It took me to a scanned image of their menu that I had to zoom around on to see everything. And it was multiple pages of that crap. What the hell is the point of that? At least format it for phones if you’re going to make people do that. And this was not some mom and pop business.
This was what made me push my mom to go out and get a smartphone to replace her old flip phone. (That, and the fact that she had no idea how to send or receive text messages, or check voice mail.)
Experience this myself super annoying in general.
Mildly annoying, but when I order on my phone, I don’t need to wait for a waiter. Not so bad tbh
Ordering online removes all communication errors, you see and know exactly what you’re ordering.
I hate that crap. At least post it on the wall or something. Don’t even get me started on people demanding a tip at places where you have to do everything yourself.
I have been slowly setting myself up with as many alternatives as possible. We have a Garmin in the car so we don’t use Gmaps, I’ve ditched all corps like Google or Facebook even run my own search engine. Honestly as daunting as it is once your not tied to a phone life is so much better. Don’t fall into the trap
Kudos to you. I’ve tried to degoogle myself (I’d say I was moderately successful until my last company came along), although it’s been a pretty irritating ride. Now I’m still very sensitive when it comes to security and privacy but not to the extent I was before.
I misplaced my phone a few days ago and didn’t think of looking for it until just yesterday. The only reason I did was for OTP for my banking apps (browser and Paypal still asked me for them). If not for those, I think I can pretty much go without a smartphone, tbh. My PC and laptop, though? Can’t.
Running your own search engine sounds very interesting. How steep would the learning curve be? And is it feasible for only personal use?
Searxng is my go to. Consider using a public instance or hosting off-site to increase anonymity.
This is how I go to. Hosted on a Linode that isn’t in my actual name. Not that that helps toonmuch
Most of the public instances I tried stopped working often enough to be annoying. Like if you set one as your browser default and then google blocks it, it’s just frustrating.
I’ve gotten into the habit of just searching directly on specific sites rather than just searching the whole internet - really when you search for things the vast majority of the time you know what site is going to have what you’re looking for.
For everything else I’ve been using bing. The results are fine and chatgpt really is dope. I know they’re just as bad for privacy as google but at least it’s not google having all my data.
Ye it’s the freaking bank and company login authenticator else I would have rooted and do whatever I want with MY phone
in case you didn’t know: it’s relatively easy to write, in just a few lines, a little program to produce the OTP codes on a computer instead of a phone app.
Interesting - I’ve been thinking about trying to decentralize lately, and been having fun collecting my data from sites to analyze my own behaviours in data and build unique recommendation engines for myself and was recently thinking about trying to build a crawler and DIY search engine for myself. Any tips/pitfalls on getting started with that?
Just replied above you. Thought I could dm anyone on Lemmy but not outside our instances it seems…
I’m getting DMs and am on my own instance…
Ah thanks, might be the app.
I’ll tell ya, it’s getting a lot harder to drive around my horse and buggy with all these darned automobiles on the road. These iron chariots are making the simple pleasures a real humdinger.
Horses and iron chariots are evil capitalist ploy. Embrace walking bare foot.
fire-breathing dragons, they are!
I’ve heard the single most important purchase incredibly low income people can make is a phone, because without it they can’t apply to new jobs or network with people because all applications are done online these days
I’ve seen homeless people with smart phones. There’s definitely affordable ones out there
You can buy a Xiaomi phone that will last you for 4 years for less than $99, and there’s some “functional” phones for much less than that but they will be unusably slow for casual use and more like emergency devices. Then there’s the 2nd hand market…
Fortunately smart phone access is not that difficult
Then you have to work out a data plan. At least in the US, free wifi is t as ubiquitous as it is in Europe (at least in my experience).
Do you not have purchase-once prepaid cards? Internet access is expensive on them but they could work for emergencies when there’s no free wifi
Maybe not ubiquitous, but it’s in a lot of places like fast food restaurants and libraries where they are okay letting people spend long amounts of time loitering on their device.
And even if you have a smartphone, you are strongly encouraged to get WhatsApp and donate all of your data to Meta that way. Not too long ago someone told me about having sent me messages through a channel don’t even use. I wonder if WhatsApp still shows me as online even though I haven’t used the app in more than 10 years.
I hate that very much. I don’t use any of Meta’s apps, except for WhatsApp. Why ? Because everyone here in Italy uses it and without it I can’t contact basically anyone. Want to contact a medic ? WhatsApp. Want to send a document to a clinic ? WhatsApp. Want to make a group chat with some study collegues ? WhatsApp, because not everyone wants to download Telegram or anything else. No one uses SMS or iMessages. Only WhatsApp…
I’ve been telling people around me to install Signal. If you want to send me messages, install Signal. I’m not installing WhatsApp, any time soon.
Doctor: Please send the exam results.
Lemming: Install Signal.
Doctor: What?I find it highly unprofessional when people use WhatsApp in a work related contexts. When it comes to healthcare matters, I find it completely unacceptable due to privacy and security concerns. Might as well ask me to print my private health related data on a post card and send that to the doctor.
Want to contact a medic ? WhatsApp. Want to send a document to a clinic ? WhatsApp.
Pretty sure this goes against multiple EU laws.
Italian here! You just described our country!
Tbf where I live it’s messenger and that’s way worse than WhatsApp.
Same in Portugal, it’s maddening
To the best of your ability, can you tell why WhatsApp is so prevalent? How is it any different than texting or calling someone normally?
In a lot of countries, especially in Europe, most texting happens over WhatsApp.
Cell providers took a long time providing free SMS/MMS, especially internationally, and lots of people in Europe have international contacts. So apps like WhatsApp became the go-to, since you could just use your data plan to message.
Same is true for most of South America. In Brazil, iphones are very expensive luxuries, so the majority of the population had to deal with android phones. Which google, in their infinite wisdom, never made a decent messaging app that lasted more than 1 year.
Whatsapp had this great feature that it let you find contacts by phone number, plus you got to talk infinitely as long as you had internet, so the transition was very easy for people moving from feature phones.
In a very short time, the app reached critical mass. If you insisted on not using whatsapp, people would just ignore you, the hassle of having to use another app or, god forbid, sms you (sms used to be charged per message sent) was just not worth it.
You should talk to your close contacts about switching to Signal
Up until long-covid and being over-worked kicked me out of a job and onto my ass for a few months, I was a caseworker for adults with severe mental illness for years.
Helping people get a government phone was a necessity if we were working on transitioning them out of their residential care facility into more independent living.
It was such a frustrating struggle for the Clients without phones… Reminders, telephonic appointments, me being able to reach them was so much more difficult if they didn’t have a phone. Even being in RCFs, the resident line was always busy or misplaced, and staff at those facilities are not always the most stellar employees…
When covid hit and everything went on lockdown, it was nearly impossible for my team and myself to reach our Clients without cellphones…
Cellphones have become so ingrained in society and are essential for access to not only normal community resources, but also essential for adequate coordination and access to one’s treatment team and resources.
It’s getting harder and harder to function in society without a cellphone. That trend will only continue. I don’t think it’s necessarily/inherently a bad thing; it’s the evolution of our society. But it certainly is a terrible thing if you do not have one…
For all the trouble it causes, the benefits I’ve seen for people experiencing disability that smart phones and Internet has is amazing. I think we do need to be treating Internet access as something people just need to live in a modern society, like water or electricity. We are probably at the point where a basic smartphone or laptop shouldn’t be considered a luxury.
As a society we place huge importance on reading and writing literacy yet forget that digital literacy is just as important. Having a cell phone is, like it or not, a pretty big part of being literate in this digital world. We don’t see people acting proud of themselves for not being able to read (at least I hope not), and cell phones should be no different.
“I don’t even have a smart phone” is the new “I don’t even own a TV.”
Right? It’s a basic expectation that you have a phone number for everything. Work, doctor, etc. But we still treat it like having a phone is a luxury, for entertainment and convenience. Buy it yourself and figure it out yourself!
Hell, even restaurants are more and more replacing menus with QR codes
You used to be able to get a military discount at Home Depot by showing your ID. Now they won’t give it to you unless you have a smart phone, sign up for a Home Depot account, agree to their ToS, log in at the store, wait for them to email you a verification email (which they do literally every single time), and then navigate back to your account, find the QR code, and scan it. It’s fucking bullshit!
i would rather download an app then show my god damn ID lol, even then it isnt worth it because you will spend more unknowningly
Why in the world would you rather go through everything I just shared (privacy concerns aside), than just whipping out your ID which takes 2 seconds?
Does anyone disagree with this? My city gives out smartphones to people who can’t afford them because it’s cheapest way they can get access to city services. Much more efficient then having staff in an office to enter data and make calls on their behalf.
I mean, the city handing out phones like this kind of highlights just how important it is considered to have a cellphone these days.
Which country is this in?
Do they also have access to public internet and public charging stations? What happens if the phone is lost or damaged??
I’m not 100% but they will replace the phone if damaged. I’m not sure about if it is lost. There is probably a cut off where giving out phones is considered worse than having social workers enter data for certain people. There is housing assistance which would include electricity. I suppose you could charge at city service points? The cell phone plan includes Internet access.
In the US there is a federal program that does the same.
I need a smartphone app to:
Access mail from my government
Log into any website as ‘me’ (taxes, car related stuff, my net bank, etc)
Buy a damn bus ticket
In reality i dont need my phone to be smart. But society wants me to
But i do everything i can to avoid getting apps from various companies. Membership bonuses etc. I hate it so much.
I do enjoy my smartphone in the car though, for google maps, music and taking a call. But… i would much rather, if that was just built into the cars infotainmentsystem.
The membership apps are the worst. Every time i shop for clothes they ask me if i already have their app. I tell them no. they tell me if i want to get it. I tell them thanks but it’s OK i don’t want it. Then they tell me if i sign up i get 2% discount. I tell them thanks but it’s really OK. And then they look at me as if i’m the only person ever that didn’t want to install their spyware in exchange for a tiny discount. Do people really just get those apps?
People definitely get them for fast food. Not me. I sure as hell don’t want Burger King siphoning my data.
I’m a “If I don’t do it when I think about it, it’s not getting done” kind of person, so I like being able to do EVERYTHING on my phone, because it’s always in reach when I need to accomplish something.
That being said, I HATE downloading apps and creating accounts to do simple one-off tasks.
Last week we went out to dinner for our anniversary, and there was a QR code to pay the bill. I think, “Cool, I don’t have to wait for the server to take it.” So, I scam the code. It leads me to an app download. Ugh. Fine. I’ll wait for this to download. Once I open it, it prompts me to create an account.
I immediately uninstall, and wait for the server to take, run and return my credit card.
The one thing that really makes me sad about common cellphone usage is the lack of face-to-face connection. It’s a trip because I went through middle and high-school without smart phones, everyone did. I miss those regular, everyday connections with people.
Those that haven’t gown up a significant amount of time without smartphones don’t think the difference is that severe, or that the connections we’ve replaced them with are the same or superior, but it just… isn’t.
Is it really the phones or is it just that connecting to people after high school gets harder?
True, school is nice in that it forces you to hang out with your peers, and that isn’t really emulated later in life. But I don’t think that’s the point.
The point is that it’s just tougher to have non distracted conversations. Or even non distracted periods of time hanging out.
It just feels awkward when someone is sitting there texting with someone else in front of you. Or just looking something up on their phone “really quick”, and then is MIA from the conversation for five minutes.
This is it. They don’t warn you in high school, but after school your friends will be in colleges or jobs miles away. This is just the way it is and if anything, cellphones would theoretically allow people to stay connected.
Smartphones turned everyone into chronic flakes though too. You can always bail at the last minute on flimsy plans you made when you were drunk because “you’re not feeling it”.
Well, connecting gets harder in the sense that we’re no longer all forced together into the same space, but phones have added a severe second layer to that. It disconnects us from those physically around us in order to digitally connect us with people not physically present.
Prior to phones, eye contact was pretty frequent. More small talk between strangers happened. People were far more aware of those around them. That’s just not the case now.
Again, smartphones have brought a lot of good to our lives, but the physical connection to people around us has been paralyzed. It really is sad, and I’m sad that it’s not something I’ll ever experience again: a space that physically connected. I’m sad that younger generations will never experience it their whole lives.
Both. It makes it easier to keep in touch technically, but whether or not they are responsive is a whole other story.
Fuck society. Grr, I don’t like how much we’re expected to have phones. It’s not just the electronic though, but the number attached to it as well.
I’m phoneless as a stand against canadian telecom companies and wow I’m basically a second-class citizen. Almost any service becomes inaccessible.
Heavens forbid I care about my own privacy and get a vpn. Now I’m locked out of even MORE services that want to ID check me with my phone.
Just let me have what I seek 😭 there’s too many steps to these services now
auuuugh rant done ty.
It’s very interesting to see how primitive services such as government’s services requires citizens to have a phone. So eventually you can literally not be a citizen without a phone.
The life I experience is an invisible struggle, but it’s partially self-induced. I wonder how others are fairing, especially those who didn’t have the privilege of choice.
Then again, my city’s vocal majority want to wipe the board clean of homeless so maybe my empathy is misplaced.
You literally have what you seek. You want to be an island, and you are one.
No they don’t; they just said they’re taking a stand against the phone company.
The reasoning behind it is concern for their privacy though.
That’s incorrect, my appologies for the confusion.
My privacy concerns are a seperate issue that causes additional turmoil. Most services throw a ton of 2fa at you once they see the vpn, typically involving some means of identifying you with a phone number. Discord is the most common place I run into. That’s a lot of stuff I’m missing out on just with one service.
I’m standing against telecoms because they provide terrible service for rediculous prices. I’m especially aware of what they can offer as I used to work in Bell’s loyalty department (lasted a month LOL). By paying for shitty phone services, I’m accepting it. I’d rather search for an alternative.
I mean, who wouldn’t want internet access anywhere they want in their city?
I can understand your need for privacy, even though I don’t go to similar lengths myself. That being said, I always prefer the way forward instead of shutting new technology out. I don’t have the answer to how that would translate to your situation specifically, but a privacy minded android or linux os with a prepaid sim card could go a long way.
It shouldn’t be a need.
I do agree. I’m behind in terms of privacy protection, but most of my energy is on escaping some life struggles at the moment. I’m fairly aware of where to find what I seek, but it’ll take a lot to collect all that information and implement it. Story of our lives though, eh? ;P
I’ve looked into prepaids, but it goes against my desire to support our telecoms. I looked into VOIPs as well, but most services block them because again, they need to identify YOU and I refuse to accept it, QoL be damned.
I’m currently thinking about shadowing off someone else’s identity. Solves a lot of my problems, but I’d like to figure alternatives and potential reprecussions before I go bumming off my friends.
If I can’t get a custom rom and use xprivacy and adblocking on my personal phone, I will instead carry a fucking ham radio for emergencies. I’m sick and tired of tech corporations but also society in general walking all over people, profiting from it and generally running things further into the ground at every chance they get.
Ahahaha ham radio future~ just you wait until everyone switches and it becomes profitable to have AI listening in. The oh-so-likely future. ;p
