Chapter 8 Always On

Are phones addictive?

This chapter explores one of the book’s central themes, our intimate relationship with our phones and whether they are helping us or harming us. Are we spending too much time on our phones - see my screentime above! - and is that damaging our mental health?

The chapter starts with a visit I made in early March 2020 to talk to a cybersecurity expert about what our phones know about us. I reconstruct my trip across London by looking at the photos I took that day, including one of a woman wearing a face mask on the tube, obviously still a rare sight three weeks before the UK went into lockdown.

My destination was the Canary Wharf offices of Digital Shadows, a security company founded to advise organisations about this new world where employees brought their own sophisticated monitoring devices in the form of smartphones to work.

Chief Technology Officer James Chappell gave me an insight into what it means to carry such a device around with you. Here’s an extract:

He looked at my iPhone and began to count the different ways it monitored me. ‘Pretty much all iPhones have some sort of barometric pressure reader, so I can tell what altitude someone is at, velocity sensors so I can tell when you’re awake or when you’re when you’re asleep.’ If your phone is not moving and it’s the middle of the night, that is a pretty good clue that you’re asleep. Many people then pick up their phone the moment they wake.

Chappell counted at least five types of radio communication on my phone. There is Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, two types of cellular radio – one for voice, another for data – and then on my phone and many like it there is NFC, Near Field Communications, allowing applications such as Apple Pay. ‘So that’s all giving quite a rich set of data.’

Then there were more sensors, an accelerometer measuring how fast the phone is moving, a compass, multiple cameras – no fewer than four on my phone . . . ‘And light sensors, so depending on whether I’m holding it up to my ear or away from my face you can tell whether it’s light or dark.’ And James realized he had missed another radio system, GPS, which told the phone where it was. In summary, these devices are collecting a vast amount of information.

So who has access to it? Well, the phone maker and the network operators have some of it, and then there is what we allow app developers to know about us. Every time we installed an app, James explained, we were asked to decide, for instance, whether it should be allowed to know where we were, or to access the phone’s camera or microphone. ‘As a consumer you want to feel that you’re entering into some kind of transaction, that you’re in theory deciding to trade some of that data in exchange for some value.’ He gave as an example a measurement app he had installed on his phone which he used when visiting a builder’s merchant to buy some timber. The app was free but supported by adverts and, as he put it, ‘if you’re not paying for something you’re the product.’ He was handing over data about his location and the kind of goods he bought so that the app developer could provide advertisers with that information. They would then be able to target him better. ‘They know I was in Camden Town, they know I was buying building materials. They’ve got access to a bunch of data to help them be more effective in making money, monetising that free user base. I’m fine with that. I don’t have a problem as a consumer.’

This advertising model, based on user data, is how much of the Internet works. ‘Data is the new oil’ has become a tired cliché, but for online advertising giants it has proved true: Google and Facebook have become the Standard Oil or BP of the digital era, reaping vast profits from their access to our data, most of it now from our mobile phones.

The chapter goes on to examine the idea of smartphone addiction, meeting campaigner Belinda Parmar who thinks it is a real concern and psychology academic Dr Amy Orben, who is dubious about the whole concept and says there isn’t hard evidence to show phones are harmful to mental health.

And in California we encounter British tech entrepreneur Michael Acton Smith who after a life of being “always on’ has created a billion dollar mindfulness app Calm devoted to showing us how to switch off.

Don’t forget:

Always On is available as a hardback, ebook or audiobook here.

And if you want to support your local independent book shop you can order it at Hive.