Cell Phones Don't Give You Cancer, But They Can Tell If You're Depressed

Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer - It's an old hypothesis, with some evidence of support but . . .

. . .There is, however, a simple way to settle this debate. If this group is correct about the size of the effect of cellphones on brain cancer, brain tumor rates should have been dramatically increasing since the introduction of the mobile phone. A study in the U.S. published in 2012 evaluated this possibility by comparing observed rates of glioma to projected rates from two studies for the period from 1997 to 2008. It found that brain tumor rates are pretty much unchanged since mobile phones arrived. If the Swedish team is right about the size of the cellphone effect, tumor rates would be 40 percent higher than they are. There is virtually no way its results are correct.

In the end, it is simply extremely unlikely that there is any link between cellphones and brain tumors. We can, perhaps, put this debate to rest and focus on the actual danger of cellphones: using them while driving.

It's a good thing this is Fivethirtyeight and not Vox, so we can have some confidence in its validity.

But the new smart phones can be trained to tell whether their user is experiencing depression:

The Ginger.io app is one of a new generation of health-surveillance technologies that doctors, hospitals and health insurers are starting to use. Where fitness trackers like FitBit record jogging distance and calories burned, newer apps and other tools measure text-message volume, vocal tone and other behaviors to peer into patients’ psychological well-being, which doctors say can have a high correlation with physical health. Health insurer Aetna Inc., for instance, says it uses voice-analysis software on some telephone calls to get people who receive short-term disability benefits back to work sooner.
. . .
Ginger.io’s app, called Ginger.io, is being used by 30 medical centers, including Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco, the company says. The National Institutes of Health has given a $2.42 million grant to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health to develop a smartphone app that will analyze factors including when patients lock and unlock their phones to determine sleep patterns in people with psychiatric disorders. Researchers at the University of Michigan are developing a smartphone app that records and analyzes patients’ vocal patterns during telephone calls to predict if someone is on the verge of depression or mania.

My sort of moronic phone isn't likely to report me to the authorities.

Finally, according to the Obama FBI, you have no expectation of not having your cell phone conversation hacked by the government: FBI says search warrants not needed to use “stingrays” in public places

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking the position that court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators in public places. Nicknamed "stingrays," the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts.

The FBI made its position known during private briefings with staff members of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In response, the two lawmakers wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, maintaining they were "concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests" of Americans.

And how do they know the conversations they are recording were sent from "public" spaces, and not "private" ones?  They don't, of course. But that won't matter:

Baltimore authorities cited a non-disclosure agreement to a judge in November as their grounds for refusing to say how they tracked a suspect's mobile phone. They eventually dropped charges rather than disclose their techniques. Further, sometimes the authorities simply lie to judges about their use or undertake other underhanded methods to prevent the public from knowing that the cell-site simulators are being used.