In the age of surveillance, trust nothing: not your iPhone, not your fridge | Arwa Mahdawi

Data-collecting devices can never be trusted, as the FaceTime bug has shown. From phones to doorbells, it's the start of a civil-liberties nightmare

It has been a terrible week for Apple. Not only did the tech company report its first decline in revenues and profits in more than a decade, but it was embroiled in an embarrassing privacy scandal. A much-discussed bug in its FaceTime app meant that, in certain circumstances, you could turn someone's iPhone into an all-seeing, all-hearing spying device. The glitch was a blow to Apple's reputation for security, and a reminder that our smartphones are essentially surveillance tools. Even if your apps aren't riddled with bugs or malware, your phone is probably transmitting more of your private information than you realise.

It's not just your phone you should be wary of. We live in an age of surveillance; data-collecting devices are everywhere. Internet-connected video doorbells, for example, which alert your phone when someone is at the door, and send a live video feed of the visitor, have been rocketing in popularity. Ring, one of the best-known connected-doorbell companies, was bought by Amazon last year; the e-commerce company has filed a patent that would combine doorbell cameras with facial recognition technology, alerting homeowners and police to "suspicious" visitors. Considering the biases found in facial recognition, this sounds like it has the potential to be a racial profiling, and civil-liberties, nightmare.