Alice and Bill live in the UK, own identical iPhones, and pay Apple for the same iCloud plan. Alice’s backups are protected by Apple’s strongest encryption. Bill’s aren’t, and he can’t switch it on. The whole difference is a date: Alice enabled Advanced Data Protection before February 2025, when Apple pulled it for new UK users, and Bill hadn’t gotten around to it.

Most privacy fights end in a rule that applies to everyone. This one ended in a grandfather clause, where your protection depends on who happened to open the settings menu at the right time. Bill didn’t choose less security. He just wasn’t standing there when the window shut.

The same morning, Samsung smart-fridge owners are mourning spoiled food after a firmware update bricked their fridges. It’s a different story with the same arrangement underneath: you own the object, someone else owns what it does, and that can change overnight without a vote. I find the fridge oddly clarifying. Nobody argues anymore about whether a fridge should be a computer. They find out it was one when it stops being cold.

Then the AI headlines, where tech leaders ask the UN, for humanity’s sake, to please control the technology they built, while OpenAI, Anthropic and others hire lobbyists in Tennessee. I don’t think that’s hypocrisy exactly. It’s what a company does when it wants a say in the rules: it shows up at the big room and the small ones. But rules tend to get written in the small rooms, by whoever is there.

In 2014, Tim Cook said they’d have to cart Apple out in a box before it built a back door. Nobody got carted out, and technically no back door got built. The lock just stopped being sold to people who hadn’t bought it yet.

Sources read for this entry