Legal Research

The Kosher Phone

By turquhart

Is a kosher phone possible? Almost it would seem, that is, until a rather large company allegedly slipped up, or "went behind the rabbis' back and switched the texting functions back on."

The Kosher Phone defined: "A so-called 'plain vanilla' voice phone that would preclude the very possibility of going online, and the attendant temptations." (Daily Intel) 

The demand for a phone with disabled Internet access, no SIM card, and no SMS text service arises from concerns about how we communicate with each other nowadays.

Certain types of interactions among people, for example, have historically reserved for the most intimate or, in other cases, most debased of social contexts. Today such intercourse is now casually or anonymously initiated and maintained in the form of 'virtual' relationships that can have profound effects on family, social and spiritual life in the 'real' world. (Fact #16, lawsuit)

The combination of the Internet and ubiquitous high-speed mobile communications has, in turn, not only magnified the impact of each of them, but is causing a shift in cultural mores no more modest than the introduction of the automobile into American life approximately a century ago." (Fact #17, lawsuit)

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Full post as published by FSU College of Law Library Blog on January 02, 2007 (boomark / email).