The trigger for this angry post is that my mac updated me to the new OS and changed the apple ID access rules. Now it requires my phone, like everyone else. The problem is that I live and work now outside of the U.S. And there is no such country or country code in the drop-down menu. This is a major problem. I am staring at my other laptop that doesn’t let me in.

For years I have been declining Facebook’s attempts to gauge my phone number, and it goes out of it’s way to make it difficult to ‘Skip’. I manage, but what if one day the ‘skip’ option is unavailable? Remember how the Facebook forced the Messenger app on us? At first, you could decline it, but then it was no longer an option.

Twitter is perpetually paranoid and often blocks me out of my account and insists on sending me text messages to unlock it. What’s wrong with my email? And when I leave from this country and change my phone number I will have to go through all the hassle of updating it everywhere.

We really don’t have any privacy left. The major internet giants collect our data and use it to send us customized ads. And if they change their lengthy terms and conditions in the middle of you using the service, you are screwed. There has to be a way around the major corporations owning us! Come on, this is a real nightmare, worse than anything a sci fi writer can come up with.

Also there is another reason why I am against all these services collecting my phone number. What if some people have speech disability? What if someone doesn’t speak good English? What if someone has hearing disability? What if someone just doesn’t want to use the phone, maybe even for health reasons. We all read about the suspicions of cancer links to the smartphones, but we have no choice other than dismiss them. We are screwed, my friends. We are just cogs in the machine, and any attempt at privacy and individuality is trampled.

I love typewriters. I grew up when they already became a relic of the past, but I dearly love their beauty and quiet abitlity to allow me to be me. The problem is that we cannot go back to the pre-internet society. Everything hangs on being plugged in, wired, connected. I don’t see any other way out of this nightmare than to perhaps to create a petition on the grounds of the disability legislation. It would make a case that requesting a phone is a discrimination on the basis of disability. But I do not have any disability. I just hate to be treated like a data point. Any thoughts?

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