[re-al]

"Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time."

They were designed to be surveillance devices! Remember when you could replace your phone battery? They corrected that 'design flaw'. Smart phones, smart meters, smart cities, 5g... this is the infrastructure of the technocracy.

Smart = spy.

When papers like the guardian present articles like these as if they care, they are in fact doing a different job. They are actually acclimatising us to the future so that we are not shaken into action, but wring our hands for a bit and move on.

To those talking about journalists needing to protect freedom, what world are you on? Have you heard of 'project mockingbird'? Have you not yet realised that journalism is just a part of the governance structure, along with education, and of course the government?

[tommit]

This seems a bit over the top to me. I don't think I agree with your overall sentiment, even though I share some of the fear.

Our phones were certainly not designed to be surveillance devices, that's just a side effect of having one central device that includes pretty much all of your life's data. As convenient as it is to have everything that matters to you on one device, it simply makes spying that much easier.

I'm not going to go into the smart home debate. I personally don't think that most smart devices are actually spying on you, though a lot of them are security nightmares and could be easily configured to do so by a malicious third party.

I don't share your sentiment towards the guardian at all. I think it's important they are writing articles like this -- thereby doing more to put an end to it than most. You not using a cell phone and telling your friends not to either is likely not having as much an impact on the public as such an article does.

That last sentence of yours pretty much makes any debate pointless, however.

[jokethrowaway]

The idea of journalism is good in principle, but it rarely works in our modern highly centralised and easily controlled society.

Journalists are not independent enough to create a market of actors with different ideas and point of views. If they are, they're probably internet blogs or youtubers and are labeled conspiracy theorists by mainstream journalists.

In the mainstream media you have a few narratives (typically one per party but there may be variations) who are sponsored by either the government or massive businesses.

There are certainly noteworthy exceptions (think about Greenwald - Snowden) but those are few and far.

[hoseja]

Education, especially history education is very thinly veiled nationalist-and-obedient-worker indoctrination.