In China, you can’t exist without a smartphone, because for all existential things you have to do (paying bills, buying tickets etc.) , you are forced to use the almighty wechat app. Smartphones are a tool to manipulate and to spy on the population. It is a tool utilized by the ruling class, to control the masses. I hate the future and I hate “progress”.
Something happened in QC a few weeks ago like this. A IIRC 60yo person who donated blood all his life, went to a donor center, there was a lot of empty seats so he wanted to do like he has done for 40 years, take a seat and give blood, but no, nurses told him he has to register and make an appointment on the application. So he left.
Elon is working on replicating it now with “X”. He’s already said he wanted something like that for the US
Try and access your US tax records online without a contract cell phone and see how far you get.
You can’t even open a bank account without a smartphone in China
I only use cash at the pot store.
This will happen and marginalized groups like illegal immigrants, the homeless, and the disabled will be effectively excluded. Poor people are going to have their finances controlled even more. This will cause deaths.
Cash and other physical payment methods (Gold, silver, Goldbacks) are important. Same goes with email instead of phone numbers since email can essentially be free while phone numbers cost money to be registered and email is easily accessible on a computer and does not require a phone.
It’s unironically good that there is further centralisation, integration and efficiency in payments, reservations, bills. What China is doing is It’s progress and future. You just can’t imagine that anything big and centralised can even in principle work for the people. WELL IT CAN AND IT SHOULD. No need to be a Luddite or dogmatic libertarian about it. What you are really worried that government or big corporation would control it. And if you are one of those that can’t process the idea that government could ever be trusted in anything, because of bad experience (and probably partly because of propaganda) then it gets to be understandable position, but it isn’t in reality like that and doesn’t have to be like that.
OK corpocuck.
What a dingus.
Who doesn’t own a smart phone tho?
People who care about privacy and mental self-determination don’t own smartphones.
But pc is acceptable??? Hahaha so self righteous getting second hand cringe here
False.
Smartphones are not a tool to manipulate and spy on tge population. Nor are they a tool utilized by the ruling class to control the masses.
Dont assume that what happens in China will happen elsewhere.
You might appreciate the work done by purism to give us more control over our devices.
Is it their intended purpose? No. Is it absolutely a function they’re used for? Yes. It’s a phone, the government absolutely spies on you with it
Adtech spies on you with it. The gov piggybacks on adtech.
Not just adtech. Wireless communication protocols too. The stuff Snowden leaked never stopped
Meh. Still nothing next to what CCP does in China.
The government spying on us, I think gives people the impression that doing nothing wrong means you’re in the clear. The part that is concerning is people who aren’t the government spying on us, what are the consequences for mishandling or misusing our most private info? What decisions will be made about us based on some algorithm that may or may not be fair. Not disagreeing with you just piggybacking on your comment for those that think they’re doing nothing wrong so they have nothing to worry about.
I disagree. The government that’s spying on us (at least in America) killed Fred Hampton and pressured MLK to kill himself. It’s the government that gets the wrong house when doing a no knock raid far more frequently than is reasonably acceptable. It’s the government that was kept in check by an implied right to privacy that no longer exists and now could run the risk of anal sex between consenting adults becoming illegal. This is the government that may charge you with a crime for menstruating wrong. And the corporations are selling your data to it. If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you better hope your data looks like you aren’t too.
That’s only a small part of what the data collection is for.
It is more interesting to consider what happens when people that know what you think start trying to influence how you think.
