"That's recording on that camera, Tom."
Lovely! All right.
Hello, I'm Tom Scott, and I've got a story for you.
It's set in a future. Not necessarily the future, I'm not saying this is what will happen,
but I think there's a plausible path from where we are now to where we will be.
And where we will be is April 2022. Ten years' time.
First person we're going to meet there is Jason Stewart.
He's the MP for Tooting and Streatham. He is the Minister for Social Development.
Considered kind of a hotshot among his party
after winning his seat in the 2020 General Election in a very hard-fought contest.
Also embroiled in a massive scandal, but we'll get back to that in a minute.
This is the 2022 iPhone. Looks about the same,
the laws of physics dictate you still need a battery brick,
but what has changed is the mobile network speed.
5G now blankets the country in hundred-megabit internet access,
and data caps are a thing of the past.
Which means that last year, Apple reused a trademark and introduced iLife.
It's quite similar to Your History on Microsoft Nokia phones,
or Droid Locker on Android. They're all descendents of the accountability systems
that have been used for police officers and care workers for years now.
With iLife, the phone is always recording audio
and sending it and your location to a cloud server.
The descendents of Siri then generate a transcript of it.
If you're talking to someone else with iLife, it'll give you a text chat log,
it's not perfect, but it's close enough.
And if you have the new Apple headset, it's got a couple of cameras embedded in it,
which are always recording video when they're connected.
That's uploaded, analysed, and stabilised by the same systems.
The cable, incidentally, still gets tangled in knots every time you put it in your bag.
What this means is that you can say to people,
'this is what I'm looking at right now', or 'this is what I just looked at'.
It's all hooked up to social networks. This is what people use it for.
Justin Bieber's comeback tour was livestreamed round the clock, and never went below 50,000 viewers.
What's more important, though, is that iLife gives you a lifelog.
A complete history of every person you've talked to,
every friendly smile, every stranger you've passed in the street.
Your own memory is now indexed, augmented, searchable, and your first 50 gigs of storage are free.
And if you think that's farfetched, let's remember Facebook is less than 10 years old.
Twitter is only six years old, and the iPhone itself? Five years.
We've gone from T9 text entry to full voice dictation in half the time we're talking about here.
Which brings us back to Jason Stewart. Jason is a member of 'Cheshire Boys',
the site for old alumni of his public school.
It runs on Disco, a fairly popular community framework,
that unfortunately has some fairly major security flaws,
including one that allows mass stealing of passwords.
Let's go to Russia. Natalia Orlowski is there. She is 15, she lives in an ex-Soviet tower block
and she doesn't get out much.
She's running a bot that pulls in as many of those passwords as possible.
Not for anything particularly evil, she saw what happened to the group
that charged porn to Putin's credit card last year,
but because she can, she takes all these passwords, she bundles them together,
and she puts them out on a Pastebin site. Because she can.
It's just another big leak, there've been loads of them before,
and Facebook and all the networks will of course lock everyone's account down
and require that they change their password again.
But in the meantime, lots of people are looking through this list and one person
is going to notice 'tootingjason@gmail.com'. His password is 'stewart9',
that's the same password he uses everywhere,
and someone goes 'hey! Let's log into his iCloud!'.
First thing they see is Apple's handy 'Is This You?' feature.
Jason Stewart can be seen in a few frames of this walkby in Shoreditch.
He wasn't recording, but his phone had his location and facial recognition did the rest,
and it didn't take too much effort to find out what he was doing there.
A few minutes later, this poison pen letter arrives in
every single political editor and blogger's inbox in the country.
The Sun eventually runs with it first, after all the blogs have made it public knowledge.
And Jason Stewart's career is ruined.
Except it's not.
Because he's not committing a crime under UK law.
He's divorced, so he wasn't even committing adultery.
It's 2022. He decides he's going to go on the offence.
He gets up in Parliament and says that
'our private lives should be private, and we must investigate these hackers'.
And he convinces the Met to investigate, which they do by
filing a request with Apple for any lifelogs that mentioned Jason Stewart
in the hours and minutes before the leak.
And Apple agrees, because that argument got settled years ago
after Blackpool.
So that's the way it works now. Someone's arrested, sixteen years old, so they can't be named,
but we know they've been released on bail on the grounds
that they not use the internet or a computer, which means of course
that they can't do anything.
And that's the precedent set. If you're in the same area as the victim of a crime,
or you say the same name as a victim of a crime in the minutes or hours before,
your lifelog will get pulled and searched through by the police.
And you can always close your account and opt out, of course,
that option is right there, but it's so damned useful.
And besides, all your friends use it.
And besides, lots of companies are requiring that their employees use it
for liability purposes.
And besides all that, it's not like you've got anything to hide, right?
I'm Tom Scott. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)