- The iPhone game Phone Story (Source: Guardian)
Just recently, Apple has pulled an iPhone game called Phone Story from its App Store, as reported by The Guardian. The main reason, according to Apple, is that the game contains “excessive objectionable content” – but what is this content that Apple finds so objectionable? Phone Story, a game developed by Molleindustria, uses satire to criticize Apple, along with other smartphone makers, on the entire smartphone manufacturing process which involves, among other things, cheap Chinese labour and the mining of coltan.
- Children mining coltan (Source: Phone Story)
The question of how our smartphones came to doesn’t appear often in our minds. One essential component of almost all of today’s electronic devices is the mineral coltan, which is used to create capacitors.
The main problem with this mineral is in how it is obtained. The majority of coltan is mined in Congo by child labourers, working in harsh conditions for as little as $1 a day. The mining of coltan also has environmental impacts as it causes the pollution of lakes and rivers and has been linked to a decrease in gorilla populations.
Businesses are now stuck with an ethical dilemma: continue using cheap coltan mined using unethical methods or switch to other more ethical and more expensive sources of coltan, greatly driving up the price of electronics.