Please let me not use my phone

Written 15 February–05 July 2025 | Posted 05 July 2025

Come with me to Þɹə, where basically everything you use has to be charged on a regular basis and can’t be used if it runs out of battery:

All of these either sometimes happen or have the potential to happen in our world! As follows:

It appears that in some cases the tap-to-pay capability can be used on a dead phone for some amount of time—for example, on some iPhones (I suspect some people are still using iPhones too old to have these features), Apple says:

You might be able to use your Express Mode cards, passes, and keys on your iPhone, even when your device needs to be charged. Power reserve works for up to five hours with some cards, passes, and keys that have Express Mode turned on.

To check the cards, passes, and keys available for use with power reserve, press the side button or the Home button when your iPhone needs to be charged. However, doing this often might significantly reduce the power reserve. If you turn off your iPhone, this feature isn't available.

Do note that it only works for up to five hours. Also, maybe it isn’t such a big deal for public transit, but it appears there is a window of opportunity where one can steal a dead phone and use it to pay for stuff with abandon... (In my experience, if you turn off Touch ID due to something something police something something fingerprints are not passwords under self-incrimination (I thought this might have been outdated because I read the article I’d seen that in many years ago, potentially even before the pandemic, but I didn’t find the link for the one I’d read so looked it up and found a newer one), you have to enter your password to use Apple Pay, which suggests using a credit card with authentication is impossible on a dead phone... unless there’s still functionality for you to enter the password, or unless it accepts Touch ID? Surely they wouldn’t let one use a credit card without authentication. Buying a train ticket is hard enough!)

Regardless of the tap-to-pay weeds, the claim is that phone-based cards are better, perhaps because people lose their phones less frequently than they lose their cards, or because it’s more convenient for some other reason. The card option needs to be allowed! For one, some people don’t want to have phones. Additionally, though, the inconvenience of cards is vastly overstated. In all my years of university, I don’t remember ever losing any payment cards, my student ID, or my public transit card! I also don’t remember ever losing my keys. A part of my brain is questioning my initial claim that I’ve never lost any of these things, saying it’s possible that I might’ve once lost these things and don’t remember, but if so only once, and in fact I think what is causing this thought is that once when I took something out of my pocket I dropped my transit card on the floor in the hallway of the apartment building I lived in, not far from my door, and didn’t notice until I came back later and saw something that looked suspiciously like my transit card, because it was. On that trip I didn’t even need my transit card (maybe I was just walking to a restaurant or store), or I would’ve noticed. I will concede the point that some people lose cards frequently, and those people might be better served by a phone-based system. But some people are better served by a card-based system than a phone-based system, and you should acknowledge that cost-benefit.

(Hmm. Some thoughts on cost-benefit: Lots of people want to steal phones. Relatively few people are trying to specifically steal student IDs or transit cards, though they might be casualties of wallet thefts. People with cheap phones might have a lower risk overall, but under a phone-based system, people with expensive phones have the risk of losing not only their phones but also their student IDs, transit cards, maybe payment cards (and maybe their work 2FA on their phones, which is a different problem) if their phones get stolen—but this assumes that only their phones, not their wallets, get stolen. How many people are stealing only phones and not wallets? Some, at least.)

At any rate, in my case, I have spent orders of magnitude more time without access to my phone than without access to any of my cards!—This is because my phone once stopped charging for several weeks, so even if (perhaps in order to avoid dividing by zero) I’m counting the time I dropped my transit card on the floor and didn’t notice, having everything attached to my phone would be much worse.

In some cases, one can only choose one—phone or card (which I guess makes some sense, e.g., with transit, if you’re trying to avoid multiple people using the same card? which is a problem because... wait... I think it mostly doesn’t make sense...). For others, such as credit cards, you can choose either. I am concerned about some moves toward removing choice that force people to use certain (usually newer) technologies in order to participate—you can only use the app; you can’t pay with cash; (plannedly) you must give up a photo of your face and four fingerprints (!) to go sit on a beach in Schengen. And I was once told by a high school principal that if you value something you need to get out ahead of the people who are thinking of taking it away, which in context was, I still maintain, an unfair task to assign to a bunch of high-schoolers The thing we valued was our at that time current amount of mandatory online class, and the administration’s decision was to increase the amount of mandatory class despite our experience of sitting in many online classes where the teachers didn’t teach any lessons but rather told us to do work, often with the suggestions that we not turn our cameras off or leave. But that’s a different story. I might post an essay about that later. , so I guess I’ll get out ahead of this and say it: We need to keep the card option, or at least think seriously about keeping it. Do not let the “phone or card” choice (which might maybe reasonably turn into a “phone default, with card option”) turn into a phone requirement.