Today, a decade and a half later, I’ve taken delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S II. If ever you wanted an illustration of the phenomenal pace at which technology advances, here it is. In what seems like an alarmingly short time, we’ve progressed from that rudimentary brick to a slim, slate-style affair with a vibrant full-colour touchscreen, a feature list as long as your arm, 16GB of internal storage and, well, slightly better battery life.

Consider that voice calls are now just a small part of a smartphone’s job and you could question whether the two phones are even really the same sort of device.

The change that’s really struck me, though, is the pricing. Back in 1996 I paid £30 for my old mr20, then signed up to Orange’s popular “Talk 15” plan. At £17.50 a month, this gave me a generous 15 minutes of voice calls a month, after which calls cost 10p a minute to Orange phones and, presumably, more to other sorts of phone. Hey, it was a long time ago.

As I mentioned, I couldn’t send SMS messages from my phone, and as for data services, forget it. This was 1996: most of us didn’t have the internet on our landlines, let alone our mobiles.

Now compare my new O2 contract, which starts today. Once more I’ve paid £30 up-front for the phone, and from here on I’ll be paying £21.50 a month. Accounting for inflation, that makes my new contract about 20% cheaper than my old Talk 15 tariff. Yet for that money I get vastly more than before: 200 minutes of talk time, unlimited text messages and 500MB of internet usage.

To be fair, the contract’s longer (two years, rather than one), but still, this represents an incredible increase in value. It’s easy to grumble about mobile phone providers, and often they deserve it: I’m sure we’ve all had frustrating experiences where providers switch around contracts in unwelcome ways, demand exorbitant fees for bog-standard services, screw up your credit rating or point-blank refuse to help with technical problems.

But when I reflect that, compared to my undergraduate self, I’m getting around 15 times as many minutes for my money – plus text messages – plus internet access – plus a phone that is itself, quite simply, gorgeous – it’s hard to feel too hard done by.

And I have to admit, I get a little excited trying to imagine what sort of phone I could possibly have in 15 years to make the S II look as ridiculously antiquated as the mr20 does now.

What terrible tariffs have you been on in the past? What chunky phones are you now ashamed to admit you once proudly carried around in an unseemly bulging pocket? While my positive mood lasts I’m declaring an amnesty, so share your worst!

 In my nan’s mind a mobile phone was basically a cancer wand, the merest waft of which could kill a man stone dead. If she was feeling particularly vitriolic on the subject, she would then claim Doris next-door (which I genuinely believed was her full name until I was twelve or so) knew somebody who’d gone deaf using one, before delivering the coup de grace – a stunning exposition on how my mobile phone was pretty much everything that was wrong with the modern world, bar Genocide and Carrot and Coriander soup.

As you may have gathered my nan was no great loss to the world of reasoned debate, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t right.  To my nan, and I suspect the majority of her generation, privacy meant something else entirely to what it does now. It meant keeping your problems in house, no matter what. Family problems never got much further than the living room, though they probably drifted into the back garden and over the fence on occasion. 

My nan never understood how we could so willingly take our troubles onto the street and discuss them on a mobile phone at the top of our voice, where any old stranger could hear them. It didn’t matter whether they would care, only that they would hear. And, the older I get, the more I think she’s right.

We all throw our hands up in the air and try to look horrified when Facebook or Phorm drifts anywhere near our personal details, but ten minutes on Oxford Street and I’m an intimate of so many lives that 20 minutes rooting around their sock drawer couldn’t reveal anymore about them. Take my journey this morning, and the girl who’s thinking about breaking up with her boyfriend because “J” has finally “made a move”. If anybody wants to meet her she’ll be meeting the mysterious “J” at a bar in Fulham on Friday. The night will be “wicked, innit”. Or how about the woman in Tesco who’s not heard back from her tenant in three weeks, and is heading over there to bang on the door. It’s the “Islington one” apparently.

I don’t understand how we can these wave these facts of our lives before us like incense on a daily basis, then claim to be so outraged when Phorm et al come sniffing around our browsing history. A part of me suspects that if Web 2.0 had been foisted on my nan’s generation, we wouldn’t have had any of these troubles. Facebook profiles would have been left blank, MySpace pages would gather dust and searches treated with so much suspision the entire concept would have died an almost immediate death.

Maybe it’s time we revisited the idea of privacy as a whole. Not just online, but in our real lives, too. If something’s really that important to one aspect of our lives, surely it must that important to the whole.