... few people question the desirability of building more protections into some of today’s mass market technologies. The question is how best to do this with the least impact on the privacy and freedoms of users...

Last week’s actions show that both of these concepts can be somewhat malleable. One of the new Apple policies involves matching images on every US iPhone that backs up to iCloud against an official database of child pornography... This comes perilously close to putting a back door into the iPhone. The new tool Apple has built could easily be applied to other images that a particular government has ruled illegal...

Parents will be able to activate a feature that monitors a child’s messages for photos containing nudity... This appears to give the lie to end-to-end encryption in messaging...

So does this mean that Apple’s latest moves, however well-intentioned, mark a backward step? Not necessarily.

The practical impact of changes like these depend on how they are implemented... And by acting first, Apple may have reduced the chance that governments will force it to take more draconian measures later.

Yet the circumstances... leave a lot to be desired... it has cut short debate about their potential impact...

A united front from the tech industry... would have instilled greater confidence. For better or worse, Apple has gone it alone...