There’s a precise moment when most of us realized something was wrong.
Maybe we were scrolling the feed and caught ourselves not remembering why we’d opened the phone in the first place. Maybe we mentioned a product in a conversation and a few minutes later there it was, in an ad banner. Maybe we woke up in the middle of the night and the very first thing we did — still half asleep — was check our notifications.
The Social Dilemma, the 2020 Netflix documentary, gave that feeling a name. It showed it, explained it, made it visible. Millions of people watched it. Many felt shaken. Almost none changed anything for good.
This article is about that paradox — and about how to get out of it.
The documentary: what it actually says
The Social Dilemma is not a story of villains and heroes. It’s more uncomfortable than that.
Its protagonists are engineers, designers and executives who worked inside Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. People who built the systems that billions of human beings use today. And who, at a certain point, decided to walk away — and to tell what they had seen from the inside.
The central message is one: social platforms are not products we use. They are systems designed to use us.
Not in the conspiratorial sense of the word. In the engineering sense: every notification, every infinite scroll, every “like,” every algorithmic suggestion is the result of deliberate design decisions, tested and optimized to maximize the time we spend on the screen. Not because someone wishes us harm. But because that time translates into data, and that data translates into money.
The business model, in short, is this: our attention is the product. The buyers are the advertisers.
The protagonists — and why their voices carry weight
Tristan Harris is perhaps the best-known face of the documentary. A former design ethicist at Google, in 2013 he wrote an internal presentation — titled A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention — that circulated among thousands of employees without changing a thing. He then founded the Center for Humane Technology, the organization that to this day works to reform the industry.
Aza Raskin is the inventor of infinite scroll — the thing that makes content keep loading endlessly when we reach the bottom of a page, never stopping. He has publicly said he feels responsible for billions of hours of human attention siphoned off every day. He has estimated that this feature alone consumes roughly 200,000 years of human attention around the world every single day.
What makes these voices credible isn’t their academic reputation. It’s that they know the mechanisms from the inside. They aren’t speculating about what might happen. They’re describing what they designed, tested and shipped.
From the documentary to your phone
The Social Dilemma focuses on social networks and platform addiction. But the problem runs deeper, and it lives right inside the device you keep in your pocket.
The modern smartphone — in its factory configuration — is an extraordinarily effective data-collection tool. Not because anyone designed something illegal. But because the business model of the most widespread operating systems, Android and iOS, rests in part on advertising and profiling.
What does your phone collect, every day, without you knowing it or explicitly choosing it?
Your location. Not just when you open Maps. Many apps request background access to your location and get it, silently, while you’re doing something else.
Your usage habits. Which apps you open, for how long, at what time, in what order. This data is aggregated and used to build a behavioral profile.
The advertising ID. A unique identifier tied to your device that lets ad networks follow you across different apps, building a cross-cutting profile of your activity.
Excess permissions. How many apps have you installed that request access to the microphone, the camera, your contacts — without that feature being necessary for their main purpose?
All of it happens legally, in the terms of service that no one reads, in exchange for free services we perceive as neutral.
What you can do — three steps
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. There’s a path, and everyone can choose how far to go.
Step 1 — The basics (any phone)
A few immediate actions, without changing your device:
- Review your permissions: go into settings and check which apps have access to location, microphone, camera, contacts. Revoke whatever isn’t necessary.
- Disable the advertising ID: both Android and iOS let you limit ad tracking or reset the ID. It’s not perfect, but it reduces cross-app profiling.
- Change your browser and search engine: Firefox with uBlock Origin, or Brave, instead of Chrome. DuckDuckGo or Startpage instead of Google Search.
- Notifications: turn off everything non-essential. Every notification is an attempt to pull you back into a platform.
Step 2 — One step further
- Private DNS: setting up a DNS like NextDNS or AdGuard DNS blocks a significant share of trackers at the network level, before they even reach the apps.
- Alternative app stores on Android: F-Droid is a store with open-source applications only, where profiling doesn’t exist by design.
- Shrinking the Google ecosystem: progressively replace Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos with alternatives that don’t fund themselves with your data.
These steps improve the situation. But they have a structural limit: the underlying operating system stays the same. Android, even in its most recent versions, is designed by a company whose business model is advertising. iOS is better in certain respects, but it remains a closed system, controlled by Apple, with its own data-collection logic.
Step 2 is useful. But it’s like putting filters on a leaking faucet: it mitigates, it doesn’t fix.
Step 3 — The radical solution: GrapheneOS
GrapheneOS is an open-source mobile operating system, built on an Android base but completely redesigned with a single goal: privacy and security by default.
It’s not a modified version of Android with a few apps removed. It’s a deep rebuild of the system, with architectural choices that change the relationship between the device and the user’s data.
What does that mean in practice?
No Google account required. GrapheneOS works without Google ever knowing the device exists. No automatic synchronization, no telemetry, no advertising ID active by default.
Advanced sandboxing. Apps are isolated from one another far more strictly than on standard Android. An app can’t read another app’s data without explicit permission.
Granular permissions. You can grant an app access to your location only while it’s open, or feed it a fake location, or deny it entirely — and the app still works, within the limits of what it actually needs.
Google Play in a sandbox. If you need apps that only exist on the Play Store, GrapheneOS lets you install them in an isolated environment — the apps run, but they can’t access the rest of the system.
GrapheneOS runs on Google’s Pixel phones — which are the devices with the best hardware support for mobile security available on the market today, regardless of the irony of using Google hardware to protect yourself from Google.
It’s not just for techies
One of the most common objections when GrapheneOS comes up is: “too complicated, that’s stuff for computer people.”
That was true a few years ago. Less so today. The interface is practically identical to Android, the apps work, and the installation process — if you buy a device already set up — is transparent to the end user.
The real question isn’t “am I technical enough?” It’s “how much do I care about taking back control of what my phone knows about me?”
Knowing isn’t enough. It takes a choice
Let’s go back to where we started.
The Social Dilemma did an extraordinary job: it made an invisible system visible, it put words to a widespread feeling, it brought the problem into public debate. But awareness, on its own, doesn’t change behavior. The data on smartphone usage after 2020 says so. We know it from firsthand experience.
The reason is simple: awareness runs up against a system designed precisely to overcome it. The platforms aren’t competing with our ignorance. They’re competing with our willpower, with our automatic habits, with our decision fatigue. And they’re very good at it.
Getting out of that system doesn’t require infinite willpower. It requires a structural choice — changing the tools, not just the intentions.
We work every day with people who have made that choice. They aren’t paranoid, they aren’t extreme techies, they aren’t out of touch with the world. They’re people who at a certain point decided that their digital life should reflect their values — and chose their tools accordingly.
If you’ve made it this far, you probably already know which side you’re on. The next step is deciding whether you want to do something concrete about it.
Want to know more about the devices we distribute and how they’re configured? Stop by the Smartphone page — you’ll find everything you need to figure out whether it’s right for you.