There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the new iPhone X—like that big old screen!—and also plenty of reasons to be terrified by it—like the way it maps 30,000 dots onto your face to memorize your skull structure so that it can quietly sit around waiting for you to look at it and then respond with mechanical intimacy by unlocking for you. Science fiction has taught us well to fear this sort of convenience, and, indeed, people are already imagining the worst. The face-lock technology leads naturally to a sort of nightmare scenario in which the phone is unlocked against your will by a partner or cop, leaving you with no one and nothing to blame but your own stupid face as they delete all of your unplayed podcasts.
While there are some safeguards built into the iPhone X—it doesn’t work if your eyes are closed, and you can quietly and easily disarm the feature if necessary—others are capitalizing on the future panic the technology inspires. Simply slip on one of the “iPhone X anti-identity theft” masks, and you can sleep more soundly and terrifyingly:
It even comes in this fancy animal print in case you want to express your strongly held beliefs in both privacy and lions being cool:
Alternately, you could just turn the feature off, but why sacrifice convenience?