another foot in the door

Nancy Elliott
2 min readAug 8, 2021

Privacy on the chopping block, yet again.

© N Elliott

As if we don’t have enough to be concerned about already, now Apple decides it’s the perfect time to step up surveillance on everyone’s phones.

In the past, Apple made kind of a thing about championing privacy, but they lately announced their plan to start scouring the photos on your iPhone, just checking, you know, to make sure that none of them appear to be matches for child sexual abuse images in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database.

While it sounds well-meaning enough on the surface, this, like other things afoot at the moment, is dangerous stuff.

Once they start policing your photos for child abuse imagery, what else might they like to police? Once you have accepted this level of access and intrusion, to what else will you be asked to submit?

And please don’t bother telling me you have nothing to hide. That is, at best, astonishingly naive.

There is a reason for encryption: we are entitled to live our lives without scrutiny. What’s unfolding here, however, is yet another step in corporate and government intrusion, monitoring, and, ultimately, control in your personal life: a dystopic loss of freedoms.

Personal privacy and sovereignty are rapidly being demolished. There has been a veritable constellation of increasingly bold violations of our personal lives and ability to make decisions. To what end? The implications should terrify everyone. It’s past time to put the brakes on.

###

Stand for freedom

Originally published at http://verulomar.wordpress.com on August 8, 2021.

--

--

Nancy Elliott

Writer, artist curious about compassion, interconnection, creativity, life.