Big Brother? (Reading06-lgrazios)

I believe technology companies can do whatever they want, but they should consider that any changes they make to the security of their products would have an effect in the demand for them. Personally I would be less inclined to buy a device if my information is at a higher risk by using it. Also on the other hand I don’t really have any private secret information that I really care about and I doubt the US government cares about. The issue comes when people’s phones get stolen and if the devices encryption is weakened then the thieves can steal the information faster. But I think it is really similar to how the TSA locks for baggage work. When these locks came into use it meant airports security team can open up your luggage and inspect it looking at your personal items and I don’t think people really cared about it. It also meant that thieves could steal you bag and if they had one of those keys they could open up you bag, anyways it wasn’t a big deal. Of course there is a big difference between personal information and personal items, nowadays information is very valuable so it makes no sense to compare these two things.  Personally I believe it is important for apple to protect their customer’s information because that is part of what they are selling, but I also see the point in the FBIs case. Sometimes it is a matter of overall safety to be able to decrypt some of the information on these phones, so once you pose a threat to yourself and others, it would make sense to be able to go around the rule. But it is hard to make these exceptions. It is also important to consider what Rotenberg said regarding how it is 500 phones involved in criminal investigations compared to 3,000,000 phones stolen and facing risk of decryption. Maybe what could be done is to create a specific key or protocol to follow to unlock these safety critical phones in order to maintain control in which phones can be accesses, but doing this will also weaken the encryption so it is also risky. I personally have nothing to hide; superficially, I don’t really see an issue with government backdoors. Of course it doesn’t really only matter if I have something to hide or not, it has to do with trusting who has access to you information and whether or not that information will be misused and taken advantage of, and that is the real issue. That being said I think it is risky to give someone that amount ot power because you never know who is going to have access to your information and therefore it is risky to have anyone view your information.