Everything is watching you and you pay for it

My phone is a Pixel 4 running GrapheneOS. It’s small, old, and does not have a hole in the screen. Almost everything runs through Cromite, a stripped-down privacy-focused browser. No Delta app. No McDonald’s app. No Instagram.

This isn’t me selling minimalism as a lifestyle. However, it’s slowly becoming the only sane response to what these things actually do.

Apps don’t exist to make your life easier. That’s only what these companies sell you. You are the product. They collect your location, contacts, usage habits, network details, and a full inventory of every other device on your wifi. Install enough of them and you’ve handed over a complete picture of how you live, where you go, and who you talk to.

Roku is the worst

I watch my firewall logs. Every few minutes, my Roku tries to phone home. Not occasionally. Constantly. It knows what’s playing, even when the source is my local Jellyfin instance serving my own files over my own network. It scans the network and catalogs every connected device’s name, type, history, and location.

Their app store is locked. You can’t install modified apps like SmartTube or SoundTV. You’re stuck with the stock versions in their store. Roku’s business model depends on knowing what’s on your screen at all times. They built their TV and media players around that.

This isn’t limited to Roku. All “smart TVs” and media players do the same thing.

Cars track us and charge monthly for the privilege

The Hyundai Santa Fe we just bought comes with a service called Blue Link. You need it for things that were standard on cars a decade ago - like remote start and trunk release. The app tracks your location, speed, and driving habits. Similarly, Nissan’s listed “sexual activity” as a data category. That’s not a joke. It’s in their own privacy policy.

The destination for all this data is insurance companies, who buy it cheap and use it to raise your rates. Brake hard twice a week? Rate increase. Drive surface streets instead of the freeway? That’s a 1.1x risk multiplier. They now have a spy inside your car. You agreed to it so you can open your trunk with your phone.

The next step isn’t hard to see. If cars don’t go fully subscription, they’ll limit how and where you can drive. The infrastructure already exists. All it takes is the right regulation. Driving restrictions for climate credits, congestion pricing, and regional lockouts are inevitable. Electric cars are on the grid, which means they can be managed from the grid. Tying charging to usage quotas isn’t far-fetched. It’s how internet and mobile data caps became a thing.

The phones

The iPhone 17 Pro Max starts at $1,100. It has a giant hole in the screen. Apple calls it the Dynamic Island, because they’ll give anything a cute name and market the flaw as a feature. It’s a 6.9-inch glass slab that costs more than a car payment and needs to charge every night.

My Pixel 4 fits in my back pocket and has no hole. I’m not interested in the newest devices with an always on face camera, the glass back waiting to meet concrete, hardware designed to be replaced in two years, lack of repairability, or the massive tablet size that won’t fit in a pocket.

The world is moving toward a smartphone only infrastructure with QR code menus, mobile payments, and digital IDs. We’re all watching it happen and cheering it on. I’m still not spending $1,100 on a giant phone with a hole in it.

The anxiety machine

I know people with $800 smartwatches. The watch exists to eliminate the distance between them and their phone notifications. The notifications are the problem.

The morning starts with a phone screen flashlight to the face, catching up on emails and messages that came in overnight. Then frequent coffee breaks, a full day of meetings, messages, and an unbroken stream of alerts on both the phone and the watch. Finish up with anxiety meds, melatonin, and wine to calm down at night, then two hours of scrolling before bed. Wake up and repeat.

They built their lives around products engineered to be impossible to quit.

The most profitable business right now is the most addictive one. TikTok, Instagram, algorithmically optimized outrage news. These devices are the delivery systems for all of it.

There’s a reason shower thoughts are still a thing. The shower is the only place most people go without a screen. Ten minutes of actual quiet, and the brain starts generating ideas again. That’s what the brain does when you stop flooding it.

Smart glasses

The next product category is smart glasses. $1,000+ devices that push the notification stream from your wrist directly into your field of vision. No more glancing down. The feed is always there, overlaid on top of the real world.

Driving is going to get interesting.

My approach for now

There’s a used Pixel 9 mounted under the dash of my car. It runs Android Auto, has no connection to my identity, runs only open source apps, and costs about $15 a month for cell service. It’s limited to maps, podcasts, and music. That’s it.

All-in-one devices are a bad idea. The phone in your pocket isn’t just a phone. It’s an always on data collection device with a camera and a microphone that goes everywhere you do. The only real answer is to make it do less, or to give each function its own isolated device with no access to the rest of your life.

If the supply of Pixel 4s dries up, my daily driver will be a burner.