Dephoning: What is it? Why should you do it?

Dephoning, also "unsmarting", is the process of splitting your smartphone up into individual, dedicated devices. The most common reason to dephone is to preserve one's privacy in an age of constant monitoring by not only the world's spy agencies, but also corporate feudal entities attempting to monetise your existence at your expense.

The first thing I should mention is, this is not an inexpensive process. Unless you're an habitual thief (more power to you), you will no doubt end up spending anywhere from 200 to 2000 USD on this venture, and I'm sorry to report that you'll still need your phone at the end of it. Of course, you don't need to rush away and buy all these items immediately in a single purchase. You can prioritise things; maybe you take a lot of pictures but you hardly ever use your media player, or maybe you use your voice recorder more than your camera. You can decide which is the more important thing to separate first.

1. Separating your phone up
2. Paying for things without a phone
3. How to take your phone with you
4. Masking
5. Laptop computers
    • A. Replacing Windows with Linux
6. Parting thoughts

First, use a leaf of notebook paper and list all the things you do with your phone. Text messaging, gaming, photography, audio recording, whatever. If you have an app that does it, put it on the list. Don't forget the basic functions: phone, SMS, torch, and media player! I'm sure you use those.

Now that you have the list in front of you, identify standalone devices that can perform the same function as the mobile app. Here are a few of the more common examples...

You'll see that the smartphone is, sadly, still required for basic communication. Some carriers offer old-style flip-phones, usually as a prepaid option. However, given the inroads that app-based payment and identity verification methods have made into everyday life, it's infeasible to completely cut the smartphone out of our life. The point here is, if we can reduce our phone usage to an absolute minimum, that will go a very long way towards reclaiming our privacy.

Also, you'll notice "Laptop computer" is on the list 3 times. Truthfully, a laptop can do most of the same things a smartphone can do. We'll talk about laptop basics in a bit here.

Now that we have the list, we can start shopping! Use Librewolf on your computer to get an idea of how much you'll need to spend on each item. Don't get discouraged here! Like I said, it'll be expensive all at once, but we can prioritise. The spendiest thing we're likely to need at this point is a laptop computer, and if you buy refurbished, you can get incredible savings. For instance, when I was shopping for laptops a few years ago, new computers were about $2500 and they didn't even have half the specifications I was looking for. When I looked at refurbished laptops, I found a machine that would do everything at a faster speed than HP was offering, for $150. One hundred and fifty dollars. That's all my laptop cost. Since merchants are desperately trying to shift Windows 10 laptops before Microsoft pulls the plug, you can get one for rock-bottom prices. I doubt you'll need to spend more than $200. Actually, what I said about laptops being the spendiest bit of this whole enterprise, that was wrong. It's all pretty equal, I'd say.

When shopping for digital cameras, make sure it doesn't have any networking ability of its own. A camera that can automatically store your photos and videos to a cloud server is no more secure than a mobile phone. Some voice recorders also do this. Fortunately, this feature tends to raise the price, but just make sure you read all the specifications on the website to make sure it doesn't indicate any offsite storage capability.

With the exception of the laptop computer and jailbroken game console (I indicated a Nintendo 3DS, but whatever's able to play the sort of games you want to play; short of a Nintendo Switch, which is also no more private than a smartphone), you'll ideally be able to fit all of your devices into the same storage compartment. These can easily be put into a backpack, or corralled within a handbag, fanny-pack (sorry, "waist belt compartment"), or some other sort of container. Personally, I use a side pocket that I salvaged from an old pair of cargo jeans. Whenever I go out, I can just put the whole pocket into my backpack. Also, I'm lucky enough to own a launch-day model Nintendo 3DS with a travelling case. Such things are hard to come by these days, but you can simulate the effect by containing your 3DS in a different pouch.

Why jailbreak your game system? Because of the sheer amount of gaming you can do when your console is freed of its corporate feudal bondage.

App-based payment is one of the reasons why we won't be able to completely cut our phones loose. I call this hostile infrastructure, and its purpose is to simulate convenience while segregating based upon economic status and supplying 3rd-parties with information on your spending habits.

Where possible, always pay with either cash or a bank card. If an app is absolutely required—and no alternatives to this particular service are available—only then should you use your phone to pay for things. What with rideshare apps taking over most of the country's cab services and app-based payment systems on municipal buses, it's harder and harder to travel without being monitored.

Most of us just drop our phones into our backpacks, handbags, or pockets and just walk out the door with them, but there are a few things to consider here. First, power your phone off. Don't just put it into standby, actually shut it down. This can usually be done by holding the standby button until the option to Shut Down appears onscreen. It's dubious as to whether your Google Advertising ID will continue transmitting when shut down (some say it does, others say it doesn't), you'll be less tempted to use your phone for things if it's turned off, which presents less of an opportunity for marketing analytics. Data can't be gathered if you're not actually using the phone.

Second, if possible, store your phone in an RFID-protected pouch. A lot of backpacks and some handbags have RFID protection these days thanks to the RFID-skimming scare from a few years ago: "Oh, they can steal your credit card info by just activating a device within range!" RFID protection is done by way of a Faraday cage, thus it also blocks outbound data transmission; meaning that your phone will be completely cut off from all external sources until it is removed from the pouch. While simply powering your phone off should be sufficient in most cases; if you have the money to spend on some kind of RFID protection, you will not have to shut it down while travelling.

Keeping your phone on but in Flight Mode (Airplane Mode, Airline Mode, whatever) is not effective, since all it blocks are incoming signals, not outgoing ones. Also, I don't recommend leaving your phone at home intentionally. You may encounter a situation where your phone is essential, and if you don't have it, then you don't have it.

There's only so far a technological de-evolution can take you in maintaining your privacy. You also have to make sure the AI facial recognition systems can't identify you. Apart from keeping nasty germs and particulates out of your respiratory system, masks also play a key role in obscuring your face from Amazon. There is no such thing as a CCTV camera network anymore; pretty much all the security cameras in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the British Isles get their data dumped into Amazon for face recognition. While stories of meticulously-crafted colour patterns resulting in a misidentification or wearing a shirt that reads "'); DROP TABLE=*" to purge the entire system are entertaining, they're not very realistic. Your best bet is to wear a facemask that is either completely black or that has a high-contrast pattern printed on it.

I decided to save the complicated bit for last. Laptops may not be expensive, but they're a bit complex when compared to a one-size-fits-all smartphone. You need some idea of what you're going to be doing with the computer before you buy it, because this will inform what kind of hardware specifications you need. Will you be using it for gaming? Will you be using it mostly for media playback and streaming? Do you need a general-purpose machine that can be many different things at the same time?

Gaming is perhaps the most system-intensive activity you can do on a computer, what with all the shaders, high-poly models without optimisations, and environments that don't cull outside the FOV. You're probably not going to be able to play the latest'n'greatest games on a laptop of any setup, but if your gaming aspirations end with GameCube emulation and maybe The Sims 4, you'll be fine. For a gaming-oriented laptop, look for a 4-core CPU that's 3.0 GHz or faster, at least 16 GB of RAM (also called "memory"), and hard drive space of 1 TB or higher. The CPU is where the price starts to soar. You don't usually need such a fast processor unless you're gaming or running advanced calculations, and anything called "gaming" or "STEM" tends to be unfairly marked up, sometimes as high as 400% above what you would ordinarily need to pay.

A general-purpose machine—that is, a laptop that can run the widest variety of programs at the cost of limited gaming abilities—will be the most affordable option for most people seeking to dephone. These are the easiest to find in refurbished options and will cost the least. The CPU speed, RAM, and hard disk space of a general-purpose laptop is about the same as a gaming laptop, but you don't need to worry about expensive video chipsets and you can probably get away with a dual-core or single-core processor. You could even get by with 8 GB of RAM (instead of 16) and a 512 GB hard disk (instead of 1 TB). But, usually, you'll be given the option to increase the memory and storage capacity before you put the computer in your cart, and the price is not high.

"Hang on, hang on... what the $#!& is a 'core' and why do I need 4 of them for gaming?" Cores are actually discrete processors within the CPU chip; computers use processor cores to schedule tasks so the main operating system doesn't slow down. I mentioned GameCube emulation earlier—Dolphin, the best-known GCN/Wii emulator, uses the extra cores to process shaders and things that the physical GCN hardware could do natively but PCs don't understand how to do. Without at least 4 processor cores, Dolphin would need to use the main CPU thread to process everything, which it can do, but the emulation will lag mightily. Basically all 3D games use processor cores in almost exactly this way, so the fewer cores, the more objectionable the gameplay will be. On the other hand, things like office work; word processing, desktop publishing, 2D drawing, and web browsing; don't necessarily need more than 1 core. It's hard to find a computer with a single-core processor anymore; they tend to have 2 by default these days. Fortunately, you don't need to memorise any of this, you just need to look at the number of CPU cores (it'll be marked on the sales listing) and compare it against what you need the computer for. 4 cores for gaming, 2 for everything else.

Now, the elephant in the room, which I'm going to put under its own horizontal rule...

Windows 10, at the time of writing (late October 2024), has less than year of support left. Anyone who has used Windows 11 will tell you that their experience has not been great; sponsored results in local file searches, a constant need to be connected to the internet, the complete inability to refuse nightly updates, and the entropy accellerators of Microsoft Defender and now Copilot running 24/7. To be fair, Windows 10 is like that now, too. So, what do you do then?

Install Linux Mint, of course! This is the most accessible Linux distribution for people who are accustomed to Windows or have not used a computer before. You will not need to interact with the Linux terminal under most conditions and open-source versions of all the driver software required to run devices connected to the computer are either preinstalled or can be installed from the Driver Manager.

You can find more information, including a tutorial on creating a Linux Mint boot disk, over on my How to Use a Computer guide. It isn't a complicated process and will probably only take you about half an hour.

Some of you might be saying, "Oh, it's too late for me. I'm an open book now." So, turn the page? Even if you've been writing status reports about your meals and your innermost thoughts on Facebook for the past 15 years, the only way data collectors can remain profitable is if they are continuously supplied with data. Sure, the corporate feudal state might know what you look like, what your dog's name is, where you live, and what you ate for dinner for the past 547 nights... but, information changes. People get haircuts and makeovers, pets die, new pets come in, people shift flats, and eating habits change. Right now, you're a running faucet pouring data into the corporate river and, even though you can't get any of that data back, you can turn off the faucet. There is no need to continue supplying the information concerns with more information.

If you're anything like me, you're in a budget crunch. Prices are soaring while wages have stagnated, and sometimes it's between getting your medicine and getting the car fixed. You have to scrape and scrounge just to afford basic things, while people like Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos are getting richer and richer by selling the information you provide to them for free. They are literally taking stock of your life, partitioning it into bits, and selling those bits to advertising companies who will use that information to sell you overpriced and substandard products. Why is this not infuriating? Why has no one massed on Google HQ and dropped their smartphones in a big pile in the lobby?

Your phone is transmitting every single interaction to its corporate master. Every installed app, every conversation, every sound the microphone picks up, every nudge of the accellerometer. Every bit of data is bought and paid for by some advertising company looking for products to sell you. It doesn't matter if you use adblockers on desktop Librewolf and Firefox Mobile; it doesn't matter if the companies can actually deliver targeted advertising to you or not. The problem is that this data is being collected and analysed anyway, and it only serves to benefit the wealthy. You get paid less and they get paid more. That's the basic part of corporate feudalism 101: get the consumer to give you money at no benefit to her, which is exactly what we all do every month when the wireless bill needs paying.

The selling point of the smartphone is that it consolidates every piece of consumer electronics into a single device that can fit in one's pocket. However, the price we've paid for this modern convenience is just too high. We don't need to foreswear all of our electronics and join technophobic communes, we just need to stop using the phone for every fricken little thing. At its core, it's a phone. That's all we need it to be, that's all it should be.