An investigative reporter has changed his tech habits after what he has learned
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I found it kind of funny towards the bottom when he said:
>We’re a pretty analog family. Aside from the requisite phones, laptops and iPad, I don’t have a lot of gear.
We've gotten to point where if all you have is smartphones, laptops, and tablets, you're considered pretty "analog".
In my EU country, pretty much everyone of age 18-65 has a smartphone and a laptop, and that's it.
Tablets, e-readers, smart watches, and digital cameras are not popular, and home assistants are pretty much non-existent.
TVs are rarely watched at home anymore, apart from the live sport events a few hours per week.
Yet, nobody considers himself very analog or very digital, and almost everyone feels like he has all the tech he really needs.
The lack of large suburban areas might be the main reason for this. Most people are either busy in the city, or in the nature with each other.
Plus home assistants in America can order things for you, get your local movie times, and have a host of other features mostly only available in the US and certain locations.
Unless you live in Germany, Japan, or the US better home assistants are still a year or two away.
Yet, most people under 40 speak English and have Google Assistant in their smartphones, but I have never heard of anyone actually using it.
Probably because everything is already a few taps away with Google always sitting in one's pocket, and people in my country still consider the idea of talking to a device a bit weird. Especially, when being around others.
And that's if you can make them actually use English. I'm baffled by the amount of technology that needs forceful and sometimes sophisticated (e.g. Google Search) reminders that just because I'm a Pole from Poland, doesn't mean I want to talk to technology in Polish.
> Plus home assistants in America can order things for you, get your local movie times, and have a host of other features mostly only available in the US and certain locations.
That would be a big factor IMO, if not the factor. Hype waves around smart assistants happen everywhere simultaneously, but most features are initially implemented only for the US (hell, I don't think any voice assistant available in Europe actually has feature parity with what you get when using it in the US). By the time those assistants become available and somewhat usable outside the States, nobody cares anymore.
Can confirm: Roommate's Alexa cannot understand Swedish, whatsoever.
I think the smaller-sized language markets are "too small" for them to even care. In other words, they don't see an ROI on it, yet; plus, almost everyone speaks English, these days, so that's more of an argument for them not to bother.
As another poster said, it's an easy market for them as the language is the same.
Cool. If someone said they didn't have much "tech" in their house, I wouldn't pull them up on their lightbulbs, alarm clock or doorbell. A tablet, computer, and a phone is really table stakes at this point.
A smartphone is table stakes. A laptop is the blind. But owning a tablet would definitely be "tech."
> Once I started reporting deeply on Facebook, I deleted all Facebook-owned apps from my phone, including Instagram. I don’t know exactly who has access to the data those apps collect, but while meeting with confidential sources, I don’t want to risk that an app on my phone might be sending Facebook my location.
Use your laptop if you must use a computer or the internet during the meetings, but you'd be better served by an independent (and dumb) tape recorder.
Off topic...I recently ran into my high school chemistry teacher at Costco this weekend and he said he lost his passion to teach because school do not enforce their "no phone" policy due to litigious parents. He said the students are constantly distracted by their smart phones. On the drive home I was thinking...why can't schools encourage students to carry dumb/flip phones for emergencies?!
That seems counter-productive.
I have family members that are teachers - and this is one of the reasons why some of the most experienced, highly skilled teachers are leaving to teach at private schools. It's not a good thing, because these private schools' tuition fees ($16,000 per year or more) mean that the children of the top 5% of wage earners in a city are getting a better quality education than the public school children. And this is in a location where the public schools are generally of good quality.
Just like any job, teachers who have reached their personal threshold of bullshit-tolerance will leave and go find a job elsewhere.
I grew up in a very wealthy school district and we had a big private school in the suburb as well. The local cops were leery of disciplining kids, let alone the teachers.
Probably has something to do with the fact that if you are willing to pay that much for something, then it must be worth it.
I attended a private high school like that, and one of my parents worked at a similar high school. The other worked in inner city schools in the NYC DOE. They encountered very different types of parents throughout their careers, yes, but I'd describe the difference as being more of a continuum of helicopter parenting, not litigiousness.
The two private schools I have some experience with (the one I attended and the one my father taught at) had no problem disciplining - and even expelling - rich kids. The only time conspicuous leniency was granted for serious offenses was when the kid was 1) a first time offender, and 2) the child of a large donor or member of the school board.
Sure, the occasional lawsuit comes up (more often than not it's just a threat of a lawsuit). But the schools I'm thinking of charges $20k annual tuition to most students; scholarships reducing that tuition are both competitive and limited. They also have a large, consistent stream of donations. They can weather the storm on most such lawsuits and have counsel on retainer for that kind of thing.
A public school, OTOH, won’t be able to block a child’s admission on the basis of their parents’ litigiousness.
Value of these schools depend on how well they manage this.
If there was an urgent matter, your parents could contact or have someone contact the school itself.
How is it so difficult?
I hadn't imagined it any other way until other relatives said their kids were actually using their phones in class. It seems utterly insane to me - how is it even possible to teach a class like that?
Schools have always had rules, so it seems like a no-brainer to enforce this one, and if parents complain, ask them to take their kids elsewhere.
I too think it's a no-brainer to enforce a no phone in the classroom situation.
Just our experience. She caters her French class to their interests. Makes paper handout exercises involving “tagging” vocabulary in photos and stuff like that. I think young people are just really into their phones and teachers need to relate instead of treating it like the enemy. She goes on her phone after the bell as well...
Maybe her job is better than those of American public school teachers as far as pay, class size and so on. Maybe cellphones are breaking the camels back down south in a way they don’t here? I could see that being the case and speaks to bigger problems
Does anyone know if portable, packable, and sufficiently effective, Faraday cages exist. Effective enough to block all incoming/outgoing signal?
In that case they could deposit their phone in the pack at a random location heading to the meet-up, then remove it at another random location later [without having to leave it behind].
Wrapping the phone in aluminum foil will do the trick. But really simply turning off the phone (which you would want to do anyway to kill the mic) should be enough except perhaps if you're up against a state-level adversary.
Reminded of that NYT piece (2015) from a reporter who went searching for the IRA (Internet Research Agency) in Russia.
(Brilliant read, and unnerving: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html)
It's easy to stray into leaving your phone on too long or forgetting one of the times. Leaving it at home is much harder of a boundary to cross without knowing.
Also, develop a special limp for just these meetings - gait analysis is also becoming mainstream.
It’s constantly becoming harder to not be tracked.
Interestingly, both star Gene Hackman as a main character.
In health, we talk about consent directives for ex-spouses of doctors, and even the NSA had some limited controls for loveint, but there is a real danger.
There are a lot of unprincipled people in tech now and that's only going to get worse.
I personally have been playing with U2F hosted on my home network and integrating it throughout my life. It's not that hard and definitely worth it when you get it going. I have been working with some YubiKeys to secure my house and my girlfriend and I's internet accounts. Recently I got a couple Solo[0] Keys. Really excited about open hardware that's not platform locked. You can seed your keys yourself and give one a massive offset then say put it in a bank box, if you lose your keys or are compromised, get key from bank and seed a new set. The Yubi and google U2F offerings are cool, but they are definitely designed to lock you in to their tooling. Buying into a single point of failure for this feels dumb.
I would think having no phone would be far better than a separate phone. For example, pinging is a way that any adversary can use to determine your precise location.
...I'd say the better analogy would be, ordering a cup of coffee and being told it definitely has arsenic in it, and it's up to you to figure out how to safely drink it.
"...still uses Chrome"
Wow
Its nice if all this tracking activities are shared and explained to non-technical folks, but these have been discussed here on HN in much more detail ad nausea over last 5-10 years