In 2006, I was leaving the Marine Corps and federal service. I had been a prolific Windows and Blackberry user, and my time at DARPA definitely got me comfortable with the mobile office environment.
Many of the colleagues I interacted with on the industry side of the equation swore by Apple products, which weren't quite yet authorized at DARPA. When I left the first thing I did was trade in my Windows machine for a Macbook, and ditched the Blackberry for an early iPhone. I was miserable.
Nothing worked like I expected it to. I printed off the "What's it called on my Mac" article as a cheat sheet and carried it with me in my brief case. It took months before I was comfortable and probably 6 months before I was fully onboard. I actually returned the first iPhone I bought and went back to Blackberry for the first 2 years in the business sector.
The following piece of feedback from a new UP Phone owner does not surprise me in the least. She said:
"Thank you so much, I am anxious to switch to your phone. I have at least 5 or 6 friends that are waiting to hear how I like the phone."
I was anxious too. I can absolutely relate to this customer. Similar to her story, in recent years, I have become a full blown Apple product person and loved the convenience of everything working just so... Even as I wrote articles about privacy fails on their side, I dutifully carried my UP Phone around and could demonstrate it to everyone. I had all of my necessary apps in place (minus Signal, turns out you can only have that on one phone at a time).
However, I clung to my woobie, until a friend of mine called me out at dinner, saying:
"You are the CEO of this company and you are still carrying two phones? One of them is an iPhone?"
My friend was 100% right, I was 100% convicted, my primary phone number and my Signal account transitioned to the UP Phone the next morning.
Our goal is to make privacy as convenient as possible. Balancing privacy and convenience is a huge tight rope to walk. If you want to prevent the cross talk across applications, services, and vendors, it takes discipline.
I resisted phone based payment platforms for a long time. Then I forgot my wallet on a road trip and realized I could still get by and pay for everything and with the exception of being asked for a driver's license... I was ok. But as you go back and do that forensics, nothing about that was OK. The connections between location, purchase, browsing, speakers, others is just not ok.
The same "anxious" customer, whom I referenced earlier, really brings it home. She finished her note to Unplugged saying:
"Everyone is finally waking up to the intrusion by unknown outsiders monitoring our cell phones. A month ago, I was going on a trip and wanted a travel coffee cup so I went to a sporting goods store. I saw a Yeti store so I walked there and purchased one paying cash. By the time I got home, there were several Yeti ads that showed up on my cell phone. How do they do that?"
They do that because we are the commodities and infrastructure for massive advertising businesses. They do it because we love convenience.
It's time to shift this paradigm. We are committed to smoothing the edges and continuing to make privacy your choice and as convenient as possible.
-Ryan Paterson
CEO, Unplugged