Why the iPhone 16 Should Scare You Shitless | Rob Braxman Tech

I was talking about the dangers of Google device tracking in the last video, and someone asked, how do I get a Google phone? Then someone posted an answer. Get an iPhone! Well, I can’t let that sit. iPhones are the worst. I made a promise to myself never to get an iPhone again, even though I had an iPhone 1 to iPhone 10 before. I was one of those people who fell in line at the Apple store during an iPhone release, so it took a lot to switch me. I’m going to give you the conclusion.

The iPhone is now the most dangerous surveillance device ever made. Keep me the zuck away from this. And Apple’s gaslighting you with promises that most of you don’t understand and just accept without question. This phone will get to know you in ways never achieved before, all from this phone’s new AI features and sensors. There are layers and layers of really advanced surveillance capabilities here, and there are quiet clues as to what’s happening, but you will ignore it because the fanboys think it’s great. Yeah, apparently it has to know you well so it can take better pictures.

All this AI is justified by the camera use. If you want to know if there’s more to this than just better photos, then stay right there. I’ve had recent conversations with two cybersecurity experts who are frequently in China and have deep contacts in China. Let me tell you something interesting. Apparently in China, iPhones are okay. In fact, there are Apple stores everywhere. Now in contrast, Google is banned in China. No Google products are available. Let’s put this in context. My friend also said this. In China, if the government comes knocking at your door, you cannot refuse.

Otherwise, you go to jail. Someone had a license plate with a number 641989 in Hong Kong, and that person was arrested. That is the date of the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre in Beijing. Another person is a lawyer who agreed to represent some of the Tiananmen Square survivors. Result? Arrested. For any company to be allowed in China, especially a surveillance device like a phone, then that company must adhere to China’s surveillance requirements. If China wants something from someone’s iPhone to see who’s thinking what, then there can be no argument from Apple.

No refusing or they are out of China. If anyone of you is a China expert and will refuse this, by all means leave it in the comments and I will discuss it with my sources. How is it possible for Apple to rub shoulders with China when it makes many promises about privacy? Such an inconsistency, right? Think clearly. Apple cares about its 3.37 trillion valuation. That’s bigger than most countries. That’s in line with the GDP of the entire UK. Apple can’t afford to lose China. Apple makes several promises with its new phone. These will sound good, but listen closely.

Here are a few that I’m sure you’ve heard. Number one, AI opening possibilities. Number two, privacy is iPhone. Number three, Apple cannot see your data. I know what many of you are thinking. This company really cares about me and these features are good for me. How could such a big company like Apple be dishonest to me? Not possible. What I’m going to show you are the pieces that justify these Apple claims and then we’ll analyze why this is truly the most successful guest lighting you’ve ever seen, powered by incredibly successful marketing and lots of money.

The foundation of the iPhone story are in the sensors of the device. Let’s start first by just revealing the various sensors on the iPhone. This device can sense everything about you. Number one, iPhones can detect a severe car crash. This is quite true. I know someone personally in a car crash and the iPhone reported the crash to emergency services. However, now you should be thinking about the sensors constantly in action sensing various events. Are car crashes the only events it can record and sense? Number two, iPhones have an eye tracking feature. This is an advertised feature on iPhone 16.

The phone can figure out your interest in content based on your eye movement. It can see which part of the screen your eyes are focused on. Wait, doesn’t it need to have the camera on to detect this? Number three, iPhones have vocal shortcuts. The new OS constantly listens to you now without even a trigger other than a voice. Your voice is a trigger. Didn’t you have to press a button before? Number four, iPhone mirroring. This is a brand new feature added to iPhones. iPhone mirroring and that’s the OS sharing what you’re seeing on the screen with your other devices like a Mac.

Benign feature, hmm, built in Trojan. Since the tech is there to view remotely, could others view it? Five, find my phone with power off. This was introduced a couple of years ago now. Your phone will not stop tracking your location even when your power is off. Some of you think you can control this. You can’t. It’s 24 seven. Location tracking permanently. Have you ever wondered why it knows how far you are to your next destination? Number six, I are tracking. The iPhone is constantly detecting your presence. How the infrared sensor is sending out a scan of its environment every few seconds to see where you are.

You think this is just for face ID during login? Then why is it doing this every few seconds? Number seven, iPhones can communicate without internet. This is something very disturbing that I’ve laid out in prior videos. Bluetooth low energy BLE in the Apple mesh network allows the phones to communicate even without an internet connection. So even if you took out a SIM card and disconnected from Wi-Fi or even put it in airplane mode, it will not stop it from communicating with Apple. It will just switch to the Apple mesh network with BLE.

The iPhone 16 will also use satellite communications. Number eight, media scanning. Something disturbing I’ve discussed in many videos is the early AI capability called media scanning. I’m going to get into this a little later, but your device is scanning your photos to see what is in them. Supposedly, this is a way to search and organize your photos. Just so you understand, AI knows what’s in your photos. Number nine, legacy sensors. Now, there are old-fashioned sensors already built into every phone that are still being used. These are things like the GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, motion sensors, gyro, Bluetooth Mac address listeners, and stuff I’ve discussed multiple times in prior videos.

And of course, there’s now the very sophisticated camera that’s fully controlled by the OS, not by you. There has never been a device ever made with this many ways of sensing its environment. It can listen to you, see you, see who’s around you, even find other people with iPhones near you, feel you, your screen can even be watched remotely. Apple calls the AI on the iPhone the Apple Intelligence. I’ve done several AI videos explaining the technologies involved in this new trend of including AI models in your local devices. This is the new feature in the iPhone 16.

The capabilities of the iPhone 16 has been enhanced. So there’s an NPU capability, neural processing unit, powerful enough to run a local AI. So the way Apple Intelligence is set up, according to Apple explanations, Apple Intelligence will be a multi-layered AI environment. The phone itself will have a local AI capable of doing many different AI tasks. But when the required operation is too complex, then the AI will forward the request to one of Apple’s AI servers. These AI servers are built with a lighter weight version of open AI. Then again, if these AI servers encounter something beyond their capability, then the Apple AI servers will connect directly to the open AI servers itself for the full open AI model.

In other words, there’s a built-in communication structure between your iPhone and the Apple Intelligence AI infrastructure. Now there were already some AI processes running in the past. In the prior versions of the iPhone, there was a constantly running program that’s equivalent to the one running on the Mac called Media Analysis D. Now what is that? The Media Analysis D program was part of the modules initially created by Apple with the supposed goal of catching people with CSAM content on their phone, something they claim they have put on hold. Let’s first talk about the capabilities of this module.

Media Analysis D, as the name suggests, was made to examine your media content on your phone and analyze it to see what it contains. Now I actually wrote some programs to demonstrate how AI can do this, and I will link that video in the description so you can understand the mechanics. This is something that both Apple and Microsoft are now doing. The Microsoft version is called Windows Recall. The main point to understand is that the image processing AI of the old Apple Bionic chips already had the capability with small AI models to understand what’s in your photos.

They claimed at the time that they could identify illegal CSAM material which is powerful enough, but more advanced AI can really understand the context of photos in more ways than you can imagine, especially with a full-featured AI. It would be like having a human examine any photos and look for things that can be considered subversive by, let’s say, China. For example, looking at references to 64, 1989. Now what changed with the new iPhone 16? Well in this case, the full AI model, a fully thinking independent local AI, is now on your phone.

This is much more powerful than just the sub-processes like image processing that your previous iPhone models were able to do. This new AI is completely now integrated with all the capabilities of the old media scanning, which I’m sure is still there, together with the understanding of all the other sensors that the phone has been given with iPhone 16. This is now a fully sensory capable robot with previously unheard of awareness. It has hearing capabilities, environmental sensing capabilities, positional capabilities, touch, and the only thing missing is its capability to ambulate. Now I have to tell you that just even stopping here without even knowing what this capability will be used for other than supposedly improving your photos, I’m already quite afraid of even being close to a device like this.

Is there a ghost in this machine that’s watching you? OMG! If you’re a conformist and you like everything your government is doing, then you will never have an opposing view, and you will never have an opposing view with your government, then I guess you will not complain. Usually though, 50% of the population have something to disagree with. In China, 0% can disagree, at least in the open. In other places like supposedly free countries like the UK, Australia, Canada, speaking about something and having someone know you speak it will also get you arrested.

Even in the US with free speech laws, you may think you have free speech, but the FBI can always put you in their terror watch list of violent extremists, which apparently they’ve repeatedly done. Privacy allows me freedom of thought. I can agree, I can disagree, I can agree at times and disagree at times. I may strongly agree and strongly disagree at some moment, but do I want a device to record this? Do I want a device to interpret this? Then at that point it is beyond me, it is now in the hands of a machine, and the machine controls my life at that point, and the question that you have to ask yourself is this, who controls the machine? Who controls the iPhone with all this knowledge of you? You think it is you? It is not.

So far there’s nothing I’ve said here that Apple can disagree with, nor any of you, because these are publicized features and are openly verified. Now let’s examine the Apple promises that supposedly makes you ignore these extremely powerful surveillance capabilities that are now powered by AI. According to Apple, Apple cannot see your data, therefore privacy is iPhone. Let’s get this straight. This device with increasingly large amounts of storage provided encourages you to put all your life’s data into the phone. Dangerously complete information, I might add, but you’re supposed to feel safe because hey, Apple cannot see your data.

And I will affirm the fact that based on statements made, they are not exactly lying to you. With this infrastructure in theory, they are not directly looking at your data, but the AI will know you very well. Is that bad? Let me again refresh your memory with information I’ve shared in older videos. Never look at current events in isolation. It is almost always tied to some history. It goes back to 2015 when the FBI wanted to unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino, California shooter Syed Farouk. Apple vehemently protested the legal request of the government to unlock the phone.

Understandably, if Apple succumbed to that request, I bet Apple’s future would have changed and it would now be the smallest manufacturer of phones. But they stuck to their guns with the added benefit of the PR that they were resisting government requests to access your personal devices. In subsequent years, various heads of three-letter agencies, for example CIA Director John Brennan, during the Obama years, actively spoke to the press about the dangers of end-to-end encryption and how that was damaging US intelligence gathering. So he and other three-letter agency leaders started pushing the concept of scanning content pre-encryption, meaning scanning your device directly instead of during transport on the internet.

I will refer to this technology as client-side scanning. Then some years after this, Apple introduced the first technology for client-side scanning. This was when they boasted that they had technology to examine the photo content of your phone. If your phone had illegal photos falling in the category of CSAM, the phone would have then identified you and report you to Apple HQ. Apple then could refer you to law enforcement. Now this little project got a lot of pushback from organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF, and many many people about such an invasion of privacy.

Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, Apple fanboys just accepted this as a reasonable feature since of course the average person is a good person and would not be keeping CSAM material on their phones. But what the people pushing back have stated, including me, is that you have to understand the technology itself. Nothing in this technology limits this client-side scanning to just CSAM. There is no technological limit that would prevent scanning of any kind of content, including scanning for references to Tiananmen Square or whatever constitutes subversiveness in any particular country. Now Apple put the CSAM project on hold, but interestingly the media scanning API like Media Analysis D can still be found on Apple devices today, so it was never turned off.

The interesting little feature though of client-side scanning is that it beats end-to-end encryption. How can signal protect your communications if the AI can just read your screens? In the last two years, government officials in the 5i countries and the EU simultaneously pushed laws that required client-side scanning, meaning direct device surveillance, to protect our children. This was debated hotly in the US and the EU, and so far the only laws that have actually passed are in the UK and some older laws in Australia, to my knowledge at least. You can correct me if there are any new laws that passed recently.

But why the simultaneous push for client-side scanning just in concert with Apple AI scanning, and then followed now by Google and Microsoft scanning? You think these are all happening independently with no timing coincidences? The biggest point here is that everyone can be happy, including Apple, with client-side scanning, because no one at Apple or even Google or Microsoft needs to physically access your device. If anyone wants to examine the content of every single iPhone in the world, just ask the AI. The AI will examine it for you and then will report it, all without human eyes involved.

Of course, Apple does not state it will report it to anyone, but they admitted that they could in the past with CSAM, so they know it was possible to report. Governments also realize it was possible for Big Tech to report. So Apple can rightly say they cannot see your data. Yep, only the AI can see your data. The AI can report you. The AI can do the scanning. The new iPhone AI is extremely powerful because of the new added sensors to the new phone. It can actually use its sensors to detect what you’re doing, when you are near the phone, and you don’t even have to touch it.

It can listen to what you’re saying and not give any electronic reaction. It can quietly have the AI observe. You cannot turn this off, since if you do turn it off, the phone just turns into an air tag and forwards the data to other iPhones nearby until it finds one with an internet connection to send the information to Apple. How can you possibly escape the surveillance if you have an iPhone? This is a little different than Google spyware, which is intended to make money off your data. But this capability allows Apple to be promoted in suppressive countries like China and now followed by many countries previously perceived to have open democracies like the UK or Brazil.

This is valuable, it is a feature that enables Apple to survive without anyone complaining about end-to-end encryption or the need to break into iPhones. It allows Apple to continue to state that it doesn’t see your data. It allows the most astounding gaslighting trick in this world, one that promotes the purposes of a 3.37 trillion megacorporation, the largest one in the world. There is no doubt that this is a very profitable move, even when you do not sell your data. They’ve already broken end-to-end encryption, they’ve already made instant surveillance available.

If you disagree with me, tell me why the iPhone is approved for use by the CCP. So you want to be part of this? I don’t. Get a safe open source privacy phone. Folks, privacy is difficult to protect. Huge companies with more power than any country prioritizes their profits over protecting you. I started a company to create products that foil these big tech companies. These products are all on my store, on my platform, Braxme. We have various de-googled phones that are invisible to big tech because they use open source OSs. Being introduced soon is the Brax 3 phone, which is a powerful iteration of our prior sold out Brax 2 phone.

We have the Brax Virtual phone, which is a service that gives you phone numbers without an identity. We have the bytes VPN service, which protects your IP address and absolutely has no logs. We have the popular Brax mail service, which allows you a practically unlimited number of illnesses, multiple domains, and a metadata free email. Join us on the platform Braxme, and you can access the store when you sign up. There are over 100,000 people there talking about privacy issues daily. Thank you for watching and see you next time. [tr:trw].

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