Your phone is a black box – it owns you right now
Your phone is a black box – it owns you right now (02:45)
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The definition of a black box is a a device, system or object which can be viewed and used, without any knowledge of its internal workings. This is exactly what your smartphone is (both Android and iPhone). As soon as you take it out of the box it’s working perfectly, so the output is great! But: you have no clue what’s happening with all your input (data). You know exactly what to press to get the results you like. How to cal, surf, app etc. But how does the device exactly do it? It’s exactly like Apple’s slogan says: it just works.
The smartphone is a black box by design. Think about it: If you would like to change the operating system on your computer, or add another one, you can. You can install software from every corner of the internet. With the smartphone, it’s been a choice to keep it closed by default. It’s like Steve Jobs used to say when he launched the iPhone in 2007: ‘We decide whatever can be installed on the device’. Later on this would be the standard in the smartphone industry.
When you think about it, this is really strange. Because more then your PC, your smartphone tells EVERYTHING about you. Everything can be connected to your location, your private text messages are on it, you manage your financial life on it through your banking app (or cryptocurrency?). It has become our primary communication device, our assistant to connecting with the rest of the world. And that device basically owns you right now, a strange feeling right?
That’s exactly what we are going to change in this course. We are going to make sure that you are the owner of the device that you paid a large amount of money for. We are going to get ‘root access’ to the device, what basically means that you get access to the very first folder of the device: the root folder. From there you can get access to every single corner of the device. It’s our starting point to do with it whatever we like, and this will enable us another operating system combined with software that is as privacy friendly as possible. Let’s take ownership of our own device!
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