Apple was recently involved in a battle with the FBI over whether or not to unlock an iPhone. Although this may seem like a trivial matter, it was leading to the possibility of  future backdoor problems for Apple.

On December 2, 2015, the terrorist attacks killing 14 and wounding 22 in San Bernardino, California left people desperate for answers to their countless questions.

The lead ISIS militants in the attack, Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, later died in a gun battle with police. An iPhone belonging to them was recovered from their vehicle in the aftermath of the attack.

The conflict facing Apple and the FBI: should Apple unlock the phone and face the possibility of everyone losing their sense of security?

Pavel Durov, the inventor of Telegram, a popular texting app favored by ISIS, states “encryption is either secure or not.”

While the real battle is personal privacy, or the safety of the country, other problems appear.

“I think that Apple should not give the rights to the government because terrorists would find another way to communicate instead of iPhones, and I think that Apple would lose its brand if they let the government do that,” Annie Pham (10) said.

But what is really at stake for a high school student to lose their privacy to the unknown public? Even if there is nothing to hide, just imagining someone looking through private messages and personal photos leaves people vulnerable and violated.

Or in the worst case, personal and professional affairs can be tampered with. The government’s military plans could possibly be at stake as well as the troops themselves if the ability to encrypt was possible in any person’s hands.

As well as saving their customers’ privacy, Apple has made a promise. The first sentence on the Privacy-Apple page states the following, “At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled.”

This means Apple has a reputation to maintain. A promise to the billions of people with Apple products who put their trust in believing that  the FBI will not take down what has taken so many programmers and engineers so long to build and flourish in the technology that there is today.

So when it comes down to reality and what we can do to save ourselves the vulnerability of exposed privacy, what was best choice? Who do you side with?