You'd think the fact that a smartphone stays in your pocket would be more alarming. The things have multiple cameras, microphones, GPS tracking devices, and a whole myriad of personal information stored on them.
They're even rectangular screens!
Someone needs to write an article that refers to smartphones in the context of "telescreens" and describe what they do matter-of-factly so we can snap out of it...
Imagine every American being in the vicinity of a remote-controllable intercept device with a microphone, camera and GPS tracker 24 hours each day.
But don't worry, you have nothing to hide, right? Can't let the terrorists win.
Unless you tunnel all your data traffic they'll also get copies of that and may sell pseudo-anonymous website usage statistics to one of the web metrics businesses. In some countries they also intercept and modify web content that you might view.
And what can you do about the baseband radio processor and its code? Nothing. Assuming you have a tunnel in operation, the phone could still be collecting and quietly sharing metadata and you'd never know.
The baseband has its own processor and, to my understanding, pretty much complete hardware control of the phone.
I don't deny that that the benefit is non-zero, but I think saying "it's not a silver bullet" is still overselling it. I think it would be more accurate to describe it as "It's all I can do, and it's better than nothing."