The hotel room analogy is almost correct. Hotel rooms usually provide a small safe for which guests can pick the combination. There is also a secret backdoor c

The hotel room analogy is almost correct. Hotel rooms usually provide a small safe for which guests can pick the combination. There is also a secret backdoor combination or master key that lets hotel staff open the safe. This creates an obvious security hole : if the backdoor combination is easy to guess, or a copy of the master key falls into the hands of unscrupulous employees or ex-employees, then the contents of the safe can be stolen. As a guest, there is nothing you can do to reduce this risk. Now, imagine that a hotel found a solution where locked safes are destroyed and replaced at almost no cost to them, and could give up on the backdoor. Burglaries involving the backdoor would vanish, and although this slightly increases the risk of losing your belongings by forgetting your combination (since the hotel can no longer open the safes of forgetful guests), it's a net improvement in security. Ten years later, the hotel community has reached a consensus that safes-without-backdoors are the Right Thing to Do. The state then mandates that all hotels should be able to give access to the contents of those safes to the police. But they're not saying that hotels have to use a backdoor combination or master key, so they're not really asking anyone to reduce the security of their safes...