Apple has released iOS 12, a new operating system version, for their smartphones this week. Though it may contain a new feature that people may not agree with.
Apple will now track your behavior, rating you on your trustworthiness.
“To help identify and prevent fraud, information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive, will be used to compute a device trust score when you attempt a purchase.”
The idea is that this trust score will be checked whenever you make a purchase on an Apple device. Those with lower scores are more subject to fraud investigations.
To be clear, the tech giant isn’t reading your emails. The trust score is generated from the phone itself, and only the score is sent to Apple servers. Your information remains private, in a sense.
I can’t help but think about China’s social credit system when I heard about this. Does this mean new phones will be untrusted by Apple? are introverts who don’t make phone calls going to be treated like scam artists? I won’t claim to understand their system fully, but there are too many variables left unexplained for me to trust it.