Comment by skeptic_ai

Lockdown mode costs ~nothing for devices that don't have it enabled. GP is pointing out that the straightforward way to implement this feature would not have that same property.

Lockdown mode doesn’t require everyone else to lose large amounts of usable space on their own devices in order for you to have plausible deniability.

now I want to know what dirty laundry are their upper management hiding on their devices...

And how do you explain your 1TB phone that has 2GB of data, but only 700GB free?

That is about one fiftieth of the work that needs to go into the feature the OP casually “why can’t they just”-ed.

This is called whataboutism. This particular feature aside, sometimes there are very good reasons not to throw the kitchen sink of features at users.

Not sure if you know the history behind it, but look up Paul Le Roux

Also would recommend the book called The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff

Apple's hardware business model incentivizes only supporting one user per device.

Android has supported multiple users per device for years now.

You can have a multiuser system but that doesn't solve this particular issue. If they log in to what you claim to be your primary account and see browser history that shows you went to msn.com 3 months ago, they aren't going to believe it's the primary account.

Multi-user has been solved for decades.

Multi-user that plausibly looks like single-user to three letter agencies?

Not even close.

Android has work profiles

Never ever use your personal phone for work things, and vice versa. It's bad for you and bad for the company you work for in dozens of ways.

Even when I owned my own company, I had separate phones. There's just too much legal liability and chances for things to go wrong when you do that. I'm surprised any company with more than five employees would even allow it.

Police ask: give me pass for work profile. If you don’t: prison.

> iPhone and macOS are basically the same product technically

This seems hard to justify. They share a lot of code yes, but many many things are different (meaningfully so, from the perspective of both app developers and users)

That’s what plausible deniability. How can you even tell?

Even more complications for a “why can’t they just…”. It’s almost as if this kind of thing is difficult to do in practice.

> Background agent in the decoy identity that periodically browses the web, retrieves email from a banal account etc.?

No. Think about it for a second: you're a journalist being investigated to find your sources, and your phone says you mainly check sports scores and send innocuous emails to "grandma" in LLM-speak? It's not going to fool someone who's actually thinking.

They need to prove that those materials exist on the device first. You can't be held in contempt for a fishing expedition.

I know it seems like an incredibly dubious claim but the "I forgot" defense actually works here.

It's not really that useful for a safe since they aren't _that_ difficult to open and, if you haven't committed a crime, it's probably better to open your safe for them than have them destroy it so you need a new one. For a mathematically impossible to break cipher though, very useful.

FaceID and TouchID aren’t protected by that as I understand it.

Actually it's been escalating pretty steadily for 250 years

And if we are it will be a new one with a high number and it will be pure insanity

Wow, so US judges are just making it up as they go along, huh? It's like every case is a different judgement with no consistent criterion.

>Doe vs. U.S. That case centered around whether the feds could force a suspect to sign consent forms permitting foreign banks to produce any account records that he may have. In Doe, the justices ruled that the government did have that power, since the forms did not require the defendant to confirm or deny the presence of the records.

Well, what if the defendant was innocent of that charge but guilty of or involved in an unrelated matter for which there was evidence in the account records?

> You comply and enter "a" password. The device shows contents. You did what you were asked to do.

No, you did something fake to avoid doing what you were asked to do.

> If there is no way for the government to prove that you entered a decoy password that shows decoy contents, you are in the clear.

But there are very effective ways to find hidden encrypted volumes on devices. And then you’ll be asked to decrypt those too, and then what?

This sort of thing is already table stakes for CSAM prosecutions, for example. Law enforcement can read the same blog posts and know as much about technology as you do. Especially if we are hypothesizing an advertised feature of a commercial OS!

It took 4 years. What is your point?

The case law on this specific topic is convincing. If you are ever in that situation it is usually going to be worth your time and money to assert the right and see it through. Case law supports this. The general maximum “penalty” is being held in contempt of court. And if the government is wrongly persecuting you, it is lose / lose if you divulge.

Do you think this is for fighting parking tickets? It is for journalists to not reveal their sources, whom might be at risk of severe consequences including death.

That's a whole lot more to loose than your money and time.

This is a misunderstanding. That's the area in which the border patrol has jurisdiction to can conduct very limited searches of vehicles and operate checkpoints without individualized suspicion in order to enforce immigration law. It does not allow searches of electronic devices.

There is a separate border search exception at the point a person actually enters the country which does allow searches of electronic devices. US citizens entering the country may refuse to provide access without consequences beyond seizure of the device; non-citizens could face adverse immigration actions.

To be clear, I do think all detentions and searches without individualized suspicion should be considered violations of the 4th amendment, but the phrase "constitution-free zone" is so broad as to be misleading.

I am not. You can still assert your rights at border points. It is very inconvenient. I have done it. If you are returning from international travel there is little they can do. If you are trying to leave the country they can make that difficult to impossible. Otherwise your rights still apply.