A museum guide said to me once that we have been cyborgs since we first wore clothes

[brin_bellway]

A customer was struggling with our app today and handed the phone to me to set up.

It always weirds me out when strangers just casually hand me their smartphones (and annoys me when strangers think they can just casually handle *my* smartphone). It feels...*intimate*. Not a *sexual* intimacy--I have no problem with my mother's tablet--but intimate.

Your computers are like an extension of yourself, you know? *Especially* a computer you carry close to you almost all the time. It's a part of your body, a part of your mind. It seems that a lot of people don't feel that way, though. Or maybe they'd be just as casual about other forms of contact.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

This seems totally legit. Computers are an extension of the self. Don't know why people think I'd be totally fine with them using my laptop at random. (Which def falls into "close to me almost all the time")

(Then again, don't know why people think I'd be fine with them touching my hair, so who knows)

[lunartulip]

I'm not sure I find letting people handle my phone to be intimate, per se, but it definitely feels high-trust to a much higher degree than most things I do in day-to-day life are. This includes most forms of physical and emotional intimacy; I'm pretty happy to engage in relatively high levels of physical intimacy with strangers or near-strangers, the main thing keeping me from being emotionally intimate with people tends to be social anxiety rather than trust-related concerns, but I need to think hard before giving even people I know relatively well free reign to navigate around my phone.

(Letting people interact with my phone within a specific relatively-constrained app while I watch to make sure they don't leave said app, or letting people hold my phone when it's locked, are different matters. Those are basically fine with me, and I occasionally will (for example) ask physically-nearby friends or family members for help with whatever puzzle I'm stuck on in whatever puzzle game I'm playing at a particular moment. But letting people play around with my settings or my files, or install apps, or use my web browser with my logged-in accounts, or anything else along those lines, are very much high-trust things for me.)

[sigmaleph]

Yeah, I feel the same way. I have occasionally been handed strangers' phones at work to solve some technical issue, and I would not at all be comfortable doing that if the situation were reversed.

I am also weirded out by people who unlock their phones via patterns and just draw them where everyone can see.

I am *also* weirded out that my parents are so casually ok with me knowing half their passwords but at least there I know why they trust me.