A wish for a world accessible without smartphones

Looking at a bit broader picture around the recently emerging age verification laws and other related regulations, how smartphones took over our world in the past decade or so. Not overly comfortable about the whole thing, even my own ideas about it, but here we go.

The daily commute

I have no car. I commute to work by bus, so see it daily how it operates here, a quite populated area of the UK, but away from big cities.

There are three ways to pay. By cash, by credit/debit card or by app on the phone. The fare is £3, however the bus company gives 10% discount on app, moreover the app is what replaces weekly and monthly passes by automatic caps when reaching the price of those.

I am not a smartphone user, thus end up spending somewhat more on the bus than I would otherwise. Which is annoying.

But let's rather look at this from the perspective of a parent (which I am not, but I see kids using these buses). So you need your kids to be able to get to school and back. Suppose you don't see it a good idea to give your kid a smartphone with all its distractions. But then what you can do to ensure he/she can definitely get back home whatever happens?

In the past where I came from, we had paper based bus passes. Expiry date with big letters on the thing, bus driver took a look, and that was it. It was simple and safe for kids to use.

How daily life went before the phones

It is a bit more speculation from my part as I am not a parent, just an observer. But was young myself, around the time when computers became commonplace.

A desktop computer set up in the living room is I imagine not too complicated to keep track of. It was there like the television, and the television neither could be seen as a safe thing to leave kids alone with, at least in the sense of knowing there could be anything on it a few button presses away.

Rolling time back a little, even an internet connection wasn't necessarily given. Without that, what there was on a computer could be well known.

What might be the difficulty with smartphones

It is vague why these age verification regulations started to spread seemingly like wildfire in a short while, though let's assume here their background is valid.

Parents need to parent - but can they? Effectively?

I feel this might be the root of the problem. The smartphone in the real world is a very private device by nature (this isn't in contradiction with that in the digital world it may not be so). Small, designed for a single person to handle, it isn't even too convenient to share like for a parent to use it together with a kid.

It is also a very complex device which without active intervention from the parent may let the kid wander onto places he/she shouldn't be or failing to serve even its intended purpose. (Reading about some parental control software, such as set up a daily usage limit on it, and then what if it gets used up by the time the kid needed to go home by bus, where he/she was meant to pay the fare by the bus operator's app?)

Add the cost of living crisis, both parents grinding at a full-time job to pay rent and all, by the end of the day too tired to even put up with their own "updates ready to install", "please click here to read the updated license agreement" and similar unsolicited issues these devices persistently keep throwing up.

Feels a valid issue to me that parenting with smartphones thrown in the mix got complicated - especially if it isn't even an option to say no to the smartphone.

Could we choose to get rid of the phones?

I mean it should be a choice not punished if someone decides the phone isn't for them or for their kids.

This is where I feel good regulations could be useful.

Make the world again accessible without a smartphone - or better say, equally and fairly accessible.

On the example of the bus operator, to have their discounted fares and automatic caps offered also by a smart card. Simple to use, always ready, never out of battery, no faff.

Wouldn't be an easy thing to do though as the apps already spread everywhere including even into home appliances. These would have to be addressed as well.

Could the phones be reformed?

I personally don't think so. It would open up way too many can of worms to try doing anything about them in their current form.

But would like to see if device and software could be decoupled enabling truly open source solutions running on this form and shape. Maybe it could allow for more kid / parent friendly solutions to emerge as well. Interface stability, set-and-forget parental control solutions which just keep doing what is on the tin. Solutions to problems which problems maybe were the origin or at least a foundation for the recent mess of laws to crop up.

Fractures, information bubbles

With all that said, I am quite lost on how things got to where they are.

What made these laws appear, seemingly in a short while all over the world? Real problems? Or possibly a push for tracking, surveillance, possibly a regulatory capture? (somehow most of these require large infrastructure which open source doesn't have)

On Internet sources, people appear vehemently against. Parents must parent their damn kids! No issues, difficulties in that ever acknowledged.

There are also the leaks which do suggest there probably is more malice here than just politicians making laws not knowing things about technology. Maybe a lot genuinely are not aware and are being pushed along by those who have their specific intent.

I feel there could be valid foundations here. People, parents who necessarily use technology including smartphones, but aren't too aware of them, how they work, what risks even exist for kids until too late.

If you look around on sites you know, how many active people you might be able to count?

A very generously optimistic and ludicrous estimate. Let's say you skim over five different people every second. You do this for a good part of a day, 10 hours. And all of them were different. That's 5 * 60sec * 60min * 10hr. That would be 180000. About a decent sized city. All the while we are looking at problems affecting whole countries at least.

There are truly incomprehensibly lot of people around us in a country, and only a small fraction of them ever participates on those sites these things are discussed. Quite much a minority.

And at last, some good thing

Not wholly related, but was nice to see some good news for a change.

Historic Chat Control Vote in the EU Parliament: MEPs Vote to End Untargeted Mass Scanning of Private Chats

Let's hope we in Europe indeed manage to walk away at least from this one mess for good.