- I've been on a mission
to cut my dependence on the tech giants.
So far I've managed okay without Amazon,
Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
But this week is going to be hard,
because Apple is my portal to all things internet.
Yes, they're an incredibly valuable and powerful company.
But beyond tax avoidance schemes,
some questionable labor practices abroad,
and that snafu with iCloud that led to the Fappening,
Apple has generally evaded negative press.
After all, the company makes its money by selling hardware,
not by selling its users' data.
Apple's greatest sin may be that
its made a product that is too addictive.
(phone dinging)
I have two MacBook Airs,
an iPhone which I nicknamed Tech Appendage,
and a shared family iPad
that saves us from our two-year-old's tantrums
on long flights and car rides.
(toddler squealing)
I welcomed the chance to put my iPhone away,
but I was very worried about what phone I was going to use.
In another week,
I'd be banishing all the tech giants together,
which meant I needed to find a phone
that wasn't touched by Apple or Google
if I wanted to remain connected with the world.
That turned out to be an incredible challenge.
Windows phone bit the dust,
and I wouldn't have been able to use it anyway
because, well, Microsoft.
Firefox phone, rest in peace.
Damn, even Blackberry runs on Android now.
So I just went to the T-Mobile store
because I'm going to try to get a phone
that is not made by Apple or Google and no luck.
Thankfully I did have a computer.
It was a Librem 13 Linux computer
made by a company called Purism.
The Librem has an Apple-level price tag of $1,399
and it comes with a lot of privacy
and security bells and whistles.
But what I was most interested in was the fact
that the company is fiercely opposed to the tech giants.
It's even registered as a social purpose corporation.
- In the physical world,
we've had centuries of legal precedent
and in the digital we have barely anything.
You carry around a camera and microphone everywhere you go
and it's completely unregulated
because you've signed a terms of service
that say you have no--
- It's a little regulated.
- There's some minor regulation,
but about digital rights, there's barely any.
- The company graciously offered to let me
use the Librem for free for this experiment.
And its founder, Todd Weaver,
drove all the way in from the South Bay
and met me at his PR company's office in San Francisco
to show me how to use it.
So you've tried to make this as user-friendly as possible
for people who have been weaned on--
- Who don't know, yeah that's right.
- I was apprehensive because when I think Linux,
I imagine the data streams flowing down the screen,
like in 'The Matrix.'
But I didn't need to know command line language
to start it up or open basic programs.
I'm really freaking out right now.
I tried to log in to my Purism computer today,
and there's a password for full-disc encryption
when you boot up, and I don't have that password.
So I decide to head to Target to get a phone.
The Nokia.
So, this is my phone for two weeks.
It's a phone from the early aughts
that was rereleased in 2017,
almost, I think, as a joke.
The Target clerk tells me how Nokia keeps making it
because of memes about how indestructible it is.
- There was a joke where Captain America's shield,
which is known as indestructible--
- [Kashmir] Uh-huh.
- is made out of Nokia phones.
- Yes.
(laughter)
I remember that one.
- I also briefly cheated and logged into my MacBook Air
to send a "help!" email to the Purism team.
They graciously sent their chief security officer
with a new Librem for me to use.
At the end of every blog week,
I get on a video call with my technologist,
Dhruv Mehrotra, who is in New York,
to discuss how the week went.
Testing...
can you hear me?
But in keeping with this week's theme of failure,
we just couldn't make Skype work on the Librem.
I miss Apple (laughs).
Little did I know, it has a kill switch
for the microphone and the camera.
I decided to give myself a break
and switch to an Android for the time being.
Oh, man, Android camera is so old (laughs).
Success!
It's hard being outside of the
gated community that is Apple.
I just don't know what to do.
How's it looking on your end with the data?
- Quiet.
- So Apple gets a lot of data from you,
if you're using Apple devices,
and if you're not, they're probably not tracking you much.
Apple only pinged my devices 11,000 times.
Almost all of it on that first day.
I think what's been interesting for me about the week
is just, like, I'm used to the car that is Apple,
and trying to use other devices is kind of like
trying to drive in a different car in a country where
I'm supposed to be driving on the other side of the road.
Like, everything is hard.
It was super easy to export the few contacts
I had entered into the Nokia to my Android via bluetooth,
but far more complicated to get my contacts out of Apple.
I had to turn on my iPhone again,
back up all of my contacts to iCloud,
sign into iCloud on the Librem laptop,
then export all of the contacts to a file,
then plug the Android phone into the Librem,
and import them.
Let's just say it was very frustrating.
Apple makes it very clear who else has an iPhone.
iMessages show up as blue bubbles,
and regular texts as green bubbles,
and while it's important that users know that,
because those texts are end-to-end encrypted,
it's also become a cultural marker
that signals your tech class.
Videos that are sent in a blue bubble
are clear and beautiful,
whereas the ones in a green bubble are a blurry mess.
I am not blue anymore,
and I feel some weird technological shame.
It was taking a while to shake my Apple muscle memory,
but I survived.
Meanwhile, Apple seemed to live up to its privacy promises.
When you don't use Apple devices, Apple doesn't track you.
And next, the week I have been dreading: blocking them all.