There’s A Psychopath In Your Smartphone

There’s a psychopath in your smartphone that is stalking you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Like some deranged weirdo completely obsessed with following someone everywhere they go, that psycho in your smartphone is doing the same but on a much grander scale than any one human could do or even imagine and the scariest part is, you agreed to it.

You probably remember when smartphones came out or even when dumb phones came out if you’re my age. I had one of those flip phones in the early 2000s. I’ve had both Android and Apple smartphones, even a blackberry that I used for work at some point earlier on in the smartphone game. While the early versions of these phones were smart, they weren’t that smart. Not like today. Today and for the last ten years, they have been getting much, much smarter and creepier and creepier.

Have you bought a smartphone lately? I just recently set one up for someone and was blown away by all the bloatware that came bundled with it and that immediately started running updates as soon as it connected to the Wi-Fi. The phone just went to town and piled up a bunch of apps into the queue and started downloading without my consent.

As frustrating as this was, it was the assumption that I wanted these apps in the first place that got to me. Sure, pre-install all the bloatware you want, I’ll decide what I want to keep, what I want to delete and more importantly, when I want to update them. But all of this really is trivial, it’s all the terms and conditions that you have to agree to, when you are initially setting up the smartphone that is the cause for concern and where creepy psycho gets his foothold into your life!

Did you read all the terms and conditions? Hell no! Who has time for that? It’s a brand new phone, the latest release, and you just want to get it all set up. Maybe you got it for Christmas, so you’re doubly excited. I get it, but the terms and conditions are what you are agreeing to allow the psycho to do.

So what can psycho do? By default, after setting up your phone, psycho can access:

• Your..
  • Phone
  • Contacts
  • Call logs
  • Text messages
  • Camera
  • Photos and videos
  • Microphone
  • Music and audio
  • Location
  • Physical activity
  • Body sensors
  • Nearby devices
• Send you notifications

While that doesn’t sound too creepy yet, the creepy part is what psycho does with all of this information that it becomes an issue. The terms and conditions that you had to agree to, allows psycho to store all of your information in a database and then use all of that information about you.

Now, as far as Google goes, they claim that they only use the data to provide you with a better service when using their products. Here is an example from the Google Terms of Service:

Our services are designed to work together, making it easier for you to move from one activity to the next. For example, if your Calendar event includes an address, you can click on that address and Maps can show you how to get there.

So here’s a question, what is your privacy worth to you? Oh, we already know that it’s worth billions to Google and Apple but what about you? Do you enjoy having everything you do tracked and traced? Do you like knowing that all of your private information is being stored in a database alongside billions of other people?

Now that you understand that there is a psycho in your smartphone watching and listening all the time, what can you do about it? Turning off these four settings when you are not using them will help stop the constant intrusion into your privacy:

• Turn off your location
• Turn off your Bluetooth
• Turn off your WI-FI
• Turn off Mobile Data

Just doing this will be one big step in establishing some sort of privacy in your life and help keep psycho at bay, at least for a while.