Resisting the Coercive Convenience of Apps for Everything
The increasing consolidation of daily life into a single device is keeping some of us glued to our phones, while shutting others out of basic necessities — it’s time to push back against needless apps, and fight for non-digital infrastructure.
The Center on Privacy & Technology staff members recently opted out of Georgetown Law’s mobile credentials, instead requesting physical IDs that “are issued based on approval and special circumstances.” Here’s what led us to that decision.
In 2016, a writer for Vox boldly declared, “the app boom is over.” While he may have been on to our growing collective exhaustion with the “appification” of daily life, he could not have foreseen a global pandemic, and the ways in which COVID-19 would end up not only leading to record-breaking mobile app spending and usage, but also accelerating the contemporaneous, and seemingly permanent, disappearance of the infrastructure needed to exist in society without a smartphone.
Of course, the permeation of mobile apps into everyday routines, activities, and services began long before the pandemic. In the wake of Uber’s meteoric rise in the early 2010s, an ecosystem that had previously been dominated by games and social media became increasingly reminiscent of the real world: banks, news media, entertainment ticket sellers, pharmacies and insurance providers, airlines and public transportation authorities, all rolled out mobile apps to provide more convenient access to their products.
But when the world shut down in the spring of 2020, convenience quickly gave way to necessity — with the known risk of person-to-person interaction and the uncertainty surrounding surface transmission of the coronavirus, tech companies exploited the opportunity to pedal a dizzying array of digital solutions to both public health and mass isolation. And while experts warned early on of the potential privacy pitfalls of videoconferencing, telehealth, online learning, and even contract-tracing and proof-of-vaccination apps, few of us were equipped to weigh the pros and cons of this pandemic tech boom.
But three years into the pandemic, and many critiques of hygiene theater later, the persistence of certain technology trends has revealed a frightening reality of pervasive function creep. Many of the technologies initially introduced as short-term solutions to specific — and in the case of quarantine and social distancing, temporary — issues have quietly become permanent fixtures. At the same time, existing physical infrastructure that is not only completely functional but often simpler, more accessible, and less prone to malfunction, is disappearing.
Take for instance, QR codes: the continued ubiquity of virtual menus despite pushback from customers is ruining the opportunity provided by dining out to disconnect from our devices and connect to our friends, our selves, and our physical environment. And while the indignity of insisting upon a paper menu — if the restaurant even has one — may be small potatoes in the larger scheme of digital exclusion, the difficulties of not having a working, or any smartphone at all, can quickly become overwhelming in more exigent circumstances, like when a QR-coded COVID form is required to board a plane back to your home country, or when access to unemployment benefits requires identity verification that can only be done with a smartphone camera.
Like restaurants, universities are among the many institutions that have kept some of their lockdown-era technology policies and practices in place indefinitely (despite ending their public health measures). At Georgetown Law, students returning to campus in the fall of 2021 were instructed to register for a mobile GOCard — Georgetown’s official identification card — to “allow[] for contactless building entry.” Though building access at Georgetown had been regulated by swiping a physical GOCard since 2001, the shift to mobile credentials was the culmination of a series of increasingly digitized building access-meets-public health screening procedures announced in the wake of the pandemic..
Given the well-documented abuse of cell phone data by both the private sector and the government, we at the Center on Privacy & Technology were wary of the push for yet another mobile-based service. The University Information Security Office assured Georgetown Law Professor and privacy and technology expert Paul Ohm that Transact eAccounts, the app that now provides the mobile GOCard, would not receive users’ location or building entries. But Transact’s privacy policy indicates that it does collect and share a whole host of other personal information that will inevitably enter the exploitative data stream of commercial surveillance.
As privacy experts, part of our job at the Center on Privacy & Technology is to scrutinize technology, as well as prevailing narratives about technology, especially when that technology is assumed to be beneficial but is capable of being discriminatory. And so we decided to investigate the possibility of opting out of mobile credentials (an option, it is worth noting, that we were likely able to pursue only because Georgetown’s medical campus does not yet have mobile card readers so the school cannot completely phase out physical IDs). Beyond our concerns as privacy experts, we felt that opting out was a small but important step in resisting the coercive convenience of appification, and in drawing attention to the digitization of everything — without public input, without fail safes, and without consideration of those who lack connectedness.
Of course, technologization is not inherently bad. Many systems have been positively transformed by digital updates. But the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” appears increasingly to lack potency in the tech world, where more digital products yield more corporate profit but negligible consumer or public benefit, and often create more problems than they solve by ignoring or dismissing numerous pitfalls.
One such obvious pitfall is that technology is not bulletproof: phones die, get lost or stolen, and are susceptible to update-induced app failures (as noted in a takedown of Georgetown’s introduction of cell phone-based dorm room locks by the editorial board of the student-run paper, The Hoya); phone signals and wifi connections can be unreliable or nonexistent; and weather, construction, and security breaches can lead to system outages. And when there are no tangible fail-safes or human troubleshooters, merely inconvenient impairments can quickly become disastrous, especially if you are a marginalized person in a vulnerable situation.
Moreover, contrary to common conception, not all young people have smartphones and not everyone on a college campus is young; lower-income and older students, faculty, and staff are less likely to own reliable smart devices or have the unlimited data plans required for consistent phone app usage. And while Center staff had the time, knowledge, and will to jump through the bureaucratic hoops of obtaining physical IDs, what of the people who don’t?
While the debate between a mobile vs. physical ID may seem trivial, Georgetown’s technological shift in building access is emblematic of a broader trend with more far-reaching implications. A sizable portion of the people in America who do not have or do not know how to use smartphones are facing increasingly difficult obstacles to accessing physical alternatives or are being shut out from services completely — whether it’s public transportation, government assistance, or cashless retail options. While offering convenience to many, tele-everything is increasing existing socioeconomic disparities — disparately impacting poor people, people experiencing housing insecurity, immigrants, formerly incarcerated people, disabled people, and other folks who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to access or use smart technology.
Finally, appification is at odds with a growing acknowledgement of, and concern over phone addiction. Numerous studies show that phones are ruining our attention spans, our memory, our critical thinking skills, our empathy and capacity to physically and emotionally connect with others, our mental health, our ability to be spontaneous, and even our posture, our eyes, and our motor skills. For these very reasons, tech elites are withholding the fruits of their innovation from their own children (while still pushing it on the rest of us). And a growing number of — predominantly privileged — children are admirably and impressively embracing Luddism. But the ability to navigate society, let alone intentionally reclaim what we’re losing to tech, should not depend on one’s financial and educational resources.
This is not to say that smartphones and apps are the root of all societal ills and personal displeasures, but that the combination of our nation’s wealth and technological progress means that a happy medium of access to technology and the autonomy to use it, or not, should exist. Instead, we are living in the worst of both worlds — as an author vented on Twitter, and thousands of users affirmed, “there is simultaneously a cultural acknowledgement that we all use our phones too much AND no real way to disconnect.” Case in point: the Center has long encouraged staff members to engage in “heads-down” or “deep” work, only to be thwarted by the necessity of ever-present, fully-charged phones to gain building re-entry should we step outside the office for fresh air.
And so the quest to obtain physical GOCards. A handful of staff members seeking IST approval to switch from mobile credentials to a physical ID (through a difficult-to-find form and a $25 fee) was not likely to turn the tides of hasty tech adoption at Georgetown, but that was never the point. As experts on privacy and critics of surveillance, we saw value in living by the best practices we espouse in our work. But perhaps more importantly, we felt compelled to resist, in a small way, the continued consolidation of our lives into an app-filled device, often without alternatives. All technology has individual and social implications that deserve opportunities for reflection and critique, and we hope that readers might be inspired to similarly expose and challenge the hidden costs of convenience.
