re: "Apple defends child protection features over privacy concerns" (BP, August 14, 2021)
Dear editor,
It is so comforting that "Apple was adamant it would not accede to any government's request to scan for anything other than images showing child sexual abuse." And of course, in a future with the scanning ability firmly in place, Apple will not get new leaders who might extend it just a little; or if China bought in, they would not comply; or if the US government tended more to the totalitarian end of authoritarian law and order, Apple would not extend the scanning just a little to monitor for other criminal activity, like communist tendencies, or conservative tendencies, or perhaps the wrong attitudes towards those of different skin colours or ethnic origins. Of course Apple will never comply. It is touching that they have such absolute faith in their prognostications for the future use to which the tools might be put by persons as yet unknown with causes as yet unknown.
Healthy institutions assume that the humans who compose them are or can become corrupt, that great evil can be committed by authoritarians sincerely believing themselves to be doing god's work or some other noble cause, such as Mao's in China. It is similarly the great strength of democracy to trust not in mythically angelic persons, but in strong, widely supported institutions founded on sensible suspicion of all persons. It is prudent to assume that all with power are human beings subject like all of us to the same temptations to do evil, especially in the name of what we wrongly believe good. It is idiotic in the extreme to imagine that any group of human beings, whether politicians, priests, professors, poets, publicans or whatever are now and always will be only angels.
Are there some out there childish enough to take the candy Apple is offering?
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on August 18, 2021, under the title "Toxic Apple 'candy'" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2167011/toxic-apple-candy
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