I read an article in the New York Times last week about a convoy of people in the States who are eschewing Smartphones. It was written by journalist Teddy Wayne. And yes, instead of iPhones or Blackberries or watchamacallits, Wayne reports that many folks he's talked to recently have bought old-fashioned cell phones that do two simple things: make calls and receive them. And boy, are these people happy about it.

For a long time the idea of an old-fashioned cell phone has been sounding like a big relief to me. Because for an even longer time I've been feeling way too tied to an endless stream of pretty unimportant emails that appear on my Smartphone. I read these emails while I'm walking the dog. I read them while the pasta is boiling. I read them while my kids do their homework.

Why do I read them? I can't really answer that. Because none of these emails is ever that urgent. I mean sure, there are work-related book emails that come in and teaching emails that need answering, but I can get to those in due time when I'm at a desk and I've put aside the time to actually answer emails.

The sneaky thing that my Smartphones does is make me feel like every hour of every day is the absolutely most perfect time in the world to get my email. Except it's not. It's really time to make the red sauce. Or time to read Aidan a chapter from the Percy Jackson Series. Or time to throw a stick to the puppy.

So for months I've been feeling stuck -- I've got this snazzy Smartphone, and I should probably use it. And I've also been feeling a little worried -- what is this phone doing to my brain anyway? Why do I have this email compulsion?

Then I landed on the part in Wayne's piece about how Smartphones create a false need to constantly check our online life. Wayne cites a writer named Nicholas Carr, who wrote a book called "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." Carr says Smartphones are making us better at multi-tasking but hurting our ability to sustain focus. Yikes.

And I'd been feeling scattered. I'd been feeling like all my thoughts were light. This could just be me. I can sadly be very light. So maybe it's not the Smartphone's fault, but Carr says that because of these phones, all of us "stop having opportunities to be alone with our thoughts, something that used to come naturally." Double yikes.

Companies are using free smartphone apps as ‘fronts’ to allow them to spy on users’ text messages, intercept calls and even track their location, it was claimed yesterday.

By accepting little-read terms and conditions when downloading apps, consumers give developers the right to harvest vast swathes of private information.

Facebook insists that people using its Android smartphone app agree to give them permission to read their text messages, although the internet giant said it had not yet taken advantage of this right.

Privacy campaigners criticised the abuse of personal information. Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, described the apps market as ‘an unregulated Wild West’.

Emma Draper, of the Privacy International campaign group, said: ‘Your personal information is a precious commodity, and companies will go to great lengths to get their hands on as much of it as possible.’

The Facebook app has been downloaded to Google’s Android smartphones more than 100million times, yet few of its users are thought to know that they have agreed to give Facebook the right ‘to read SMS messages stored on your device or SIM card’. Apps are also used to identify the location of users through global positioning software and access the phone numbers and email addresses of their contacts.

A spokesman for Facebook said the request for permission to read text messages was to allow the app to read and write data between itself and the phone’s SMS feature, rather than for the company to trawl individuals’ messages.

He added: ‘If Facebook ultimately launches any feature that makes use of these permissions, we will ensure that this is accompanied by appropriate guidance.’