Over the weekend, I acquired a new, dubiously named, smart phone. It was shiny and powerful and a whole bunch of intelligence went into its manufacture, I’m sure.

Still, I refuse to call this thing — or any of my previous handheld computers that also made phone calls — “smart,” especially when the manuals for it took up more room, and weighed more, than the phone did.

This new phone also has a different operating system from the one I’ve used for years, so as I worked to set it up the way I liked it, I had more than one “stupid” moment. This system didn’t have all the bugs worked out of my audiobook program. The old system had most of them fixed.

This system works only sometimes with my wireless headset. The old system worked most of the time.

This system’s calendar didn’t work like the old system’s.

This system didn’t have the same apps that were available on my old system.

That was all the phone being stupid, but I took my turn, too.

This system didn’t show me in a convenient list all the ways that every single app I wanted to install was going to invade my privacy and where it was going to send my data. The old system did.

What did I do? Installed (some of) them anyway and grumbled about how on the old system, stuff just worked. If I got a new phone on that system, all of my stuff showed up like magic. Sometimes I didn’t even have to enter a password.

Wait. Was that a good thing?

Not really, once I thought about it. If I don’t have to prove my identity to my electronic devices, why would anyone else have to? And what information could someone actually get from my phone if they, unlike me, put in the effort to figure out what data is collected, where it’s stored, etc? And now that I’ve switched systems, why would I give two companies access to all my data?

Apple is trying to make that point in its defiance of requests to unlock the personal phone of one of the subjects in the San Bernardino shootings earlier this year. It’s a weak position, considering the company has previously assisted law enforcement in getting private data from some of its devices to investigate crimes. But any defenses against the slow erosion of our anonymity and our rights to privacy are better than none.