Mobiles are our everything, so don’t be shocked they can now even gauge our mental health

My mum came back from a party when I was little and told me about a conversation she’d had with somebody who worked for BT. “In the future, we won’t phone a family,” he’d said to her, to our general 1980s bafflement, all Rubik’s Cubes and CND badges. “We’ll call a person.” I think of this whenever mobile phones are in the news. So yes, I think of it often.

In the long years since, mobile phones have become our everythings. They contain our secrets and our lies and our photos of sunsets, they told us someone loved us and that our uncle had died.