Trackers, not phones

Read Peter Maass' and Megha Rajagopalan's piece "That's No Phone. That's My Tracker" in the New York Times.

If we are naïve to think of them as phones, what should we call them? Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, argues that they are robots for which we — the proud owners — are merely the hands and feet. “They see everything, they’re aware of our position, our relationship to other human beings and other robots, they mediate an information stream around us,” he has said.

Implanting a chip in each of us would require a lot of work and engender huge resistance. As things stand, not only has the same effect been achieved without so much as a murmur from civil-liberties advocates, but we've each paid for the privilege.