Apple adding spyware to iPhones to “detect” if you’re mentally ill, using the camera.

Apple iPhones are adding spyware that uses the camera to detect mental illness.

While there are many things that can be said about this, I think most people would agree that it’s intrusive, and it may even be illegal under various privacy laws, including the Biometric Information Privacy Act of Illinois.

The first thing Apple will probably do with it is determine how to use people’s depression and insecurities to sell them more junk using “retail therapy”. Then what? Will they share it with the government? Potential employers? Advertising companies?

If they do get sued, what compensation will you get? $50 after the lawyers get done taking $50 million out of the settlement pot?

Now would be a great time to stop using iPhones. They cause mental illness and make it difficult to sleep or have any real friends anyway.

In fact, one of the things my spouse accidentally did do with his iPhone was charge up microtransactions on stupid freemium games, and that came at a time of financial strife anyway.

Then he didn’t even understand why I was upset.

These things have done pretty much no good for you, me, or for society. Maybe you should get rid of it? I think my spouse is a lost cause, because like many, he wouldn’t understand how awful the iPhone is if I tried to explain until I was blue in the face.

Apple already accuses anyone who wants privacy from them of being a child pornographer or one of their sympathizers, as a straw man attack in order to excuse rifling through their phone, and now this! Then, they ludicrously carry on that Apple “will scream louder” than anyone who wants their freedom and privacy. Although, immediately after doing that, the public backlash grew to the point that they sort of crawled back in their hole.

(They say they still scan iCloud, and I suppose since that’s their servers, they have a right to do this, but you should also have a right to refuse iCloud even being running if you don’t agree to have your files scanned. Since I don’t use iPhones, I don’t know how that’s set up.)

This “mental illness” scanner is no way to allow yourself to be treated and the backlash should be even louder than with the device-scanning spyware. But Apple seems determined, perhaps because they haven’t innovated since a decade ago, no new products except some idiotic watch that only a complete moron would buy. They are going to monetize this somehow.

The iPhone is like A Scanner Darkly or Nineteen Eighty-Four, and people actually pay to be treated like this. It’s absolutely disgusting.