I, Phone

Thinking of your phone as an extension of yourself isn’t crazy. To say that your phone knows more about you than you know about you isn’t an exaggeration; it's a statement of fact. Do you remember your location every minute of every day? Do you remember what you said to your friend last leap day at 10:47 word-for-word? Yeah, of course not. Hell, without photos, entire holidays would slide out of your mind.

While paperwork that tracks us has existed since papyrus, without people feeling like those hieroglyphs were literally an extension of the human mind, a phone can hold the equivalent of millions of papyrus pages. At some point, a difference of amount becomes a difference of kind. Since you bought it, how many hours has your phone been more than an arm's reach away? Possibly zero. There's no other object like that in your life. Given the choice to have someone read your mind or read your phone, if you seriously think about it, you’d probably pick the former.

Compared to what's in your phone, your brain holds a tiny amount of information, much of it wrong, all of it lossy. It's easy to forget what kind of embarrassment your phone contains, because it has so much you can't even remember, as you discover when someone flips through a bunch of photos you thought were safe but suddenly discover aren't. And while the phone now is an extension of the self, we all know where this is going. A computer chip in your skull will eventually be as quasi-mandatory as a phone is today, and avoiding one will make you seem Amish.

If we don't protect our most intimate digital devices as part of the self, legally, we're going to be in some scary places in the future. Because the law is a complicated brick structure of individuals laws, each resting on what came before. This is why you hear lawyers argue based on laws from three hundred years ago: that's not by insanity but by design. And it’s why people freak out over court cases that lay down a new brick in a new area — it's not about this brick. It's about what will, inevitably, be built on top of it.

To argue, "Don't worry, this law is just for this case, this time," is to argue against what the law is. Like a chess player saying to his opponent, ‘This move isn’t about future moves.’ That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Three hundred years ago, someone writes a law about papers in your house at a time when papers and books were luxury items and half the population, illiterate. And then it's applied to millions of intangible files on your phone, which, in aggregate, record every detail of your life.

Maybe you think that's good. Maybe you don't. But either way, the modern law is built atop the old. And it's why people are right to be concerned about each precedent-setting law and why 'slippery-slope fallacy' does not apply here. Thinking about today's law is thinking about future law, and access to your phone today is, unavoidably, about access to your mind tomorrow.