Phones are a special kind of computer that are designed to let people interact with other people from behind a healthy and sensible layer of abstraction. Phones also usually facilitate usage of the internet. They may be used to call or text other people, send email, or use websites.
People are, in 2020, very attached to their phones. They use them all day, at all times, for all kinds of purposes, all over the world. People and phones seem to be pretty much inseperable.
An important thing to consider about phones is that many or all of them are made by, used through, and (therefore) monitored by large, for-profit corporations. In addition, just about all of these companies share the information they gather about people's usage of their phones with the government, and the government collects the rest anyway. A whistleblower named Edward Snowden make global headlines in 2013 by exposing various world powers' mass surveillance of phone activity (among other things) to the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, and then, although the information didn't exactly go away, almost nothing meaningful happened.
Phones also present a spot of difficulty on the basis of being so available. Because most people keep their phones on them and operational at all times, they're usually just a second away from looking at them. Generally, people are good at not using their phones when they really shouldn't, but still, there are so many people and so many phones that someone in your vicinity is almost certainly going to be looking at their phone at an inopportune moment no matter what you're doing. This kind of distraction can be problematic if—for example—the distracted person is driving a car on the highway.
As a final note, phones are very good at facilitating access to pictures of puppies.
Because phones are mostly useful for mundane purposes, we think they're not really dangerous.
