I find it very strange that Apple is held as a champion of privacy while simultaneously creating a culture of incredibly poor passwords. Perhaps the problem is

I find it very strange that Apple is held as a champion of privacy while simultaneously creating a culture of incredibly poor passwords. Perhaps the problem is that there are “two” privacies - the everyday protections against, say, Facebook, and the more traditional worry of a journalist in a hostile country. Either way, I think we need to be taking this more seriously - most international borders require you now to take a picture. But forget countries, Disneyland now takes your picture by having an employee point an iPhone at you, a device equipped theoretically with the same technologies to reproduce whatever face data is necessary to get into your phone. To me, the “triumph” of FaceID and TouchID is analogous to Apple having “solved” the password problem by just auto-selecting “123” for everyone. Part of the responsibility of privacy protection is in the culture you build and how you implicitly educate your user through your designs. Apple bends over backwards telling everyone how crazy secure FaceID is, while potentially setting them up to have their data entered into incredibly easily when dealing with the most dangerous adversaries. There was a great opportunity here to make a great feature that also educated the user: FaceID could have for example been an Apple Wallet feature. Credit Cards are a system built to expect fraud. They are expected to be stolen, and that’s why they build in a system to reverse charges. Telling a user that an Apple Pay charge can be quick and painless with FaceID (and avoid a full phone unlock) since the danger is not permanent would have still been more convenient than before. At the same time, by requiring the user to type a full password to access their data, the user would implicitly be taught that data theft is for some reason more dangerous, and thus begin to build the same intuitions computer-literate users have. In fact, if all the user did was use FaceID for their credit cards and no password for their photos, it would account for most of “normal” people’s security concerns, without also inadvertently confusing the security conversation where activists may not know the proper way to secure their data.