In the early days of computing, users had complete control over the software they put on their device and there was no way for software companies to remotely revoke their access to the device or the apps on the device.

But the rise of the internet and Big Tech companies has changed this dynamic. Now, the operating systems that power users’ devices are heavily integrated with user accounts.

Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android, which collectively have a 95% market share of the operating system market according to analytics service GlobalStats, all aggressively promote or require users to sign in to an account.

To gain access to all of the device’s features and the main app stores when using these operating systems, users have to sign in and link their operating system with these Big Tech controlled user accounts.

While there are ways to use these operating systems without signing in and workarounds such as sideloading and jailbreaking can be used to install apps without going through the main app stores, the vast majority of users aren’t aware of or comfortable with using these workarounds. For example, web traffic to the leading iOS jailbreaking websites suggests that less than 0.1% of Apple’s estimated 1 billion iPhone users jailbreak their devices.

For the vast majority of users, linking their device’s operating system with a Big Tech controlled user account and then installing apps via that account’s app store is the only process they know.

This normalization of the deep integration between a device’s operating system and user accounts has given three of the world’s largest and most powerful tech companies, Microsoft (which develops Windows), Apple (which develops macOS and iOS), and Google (which develops Android), almost complete control over user’s devices.

Since these device-linked user accounts are the gateway to all the apps and data on the device, locking these accounts essentially renders the device useless and prevents the user from accessing any of their data.

Although these Big Tech companies have rarely wielded their device locking powers, a couple of stories from this year have shown that this trend is on the horizon and slowly becoming a reality.

The temporary lockdown of MacOS

When Apple launched Big Sur, the latest version of macOS, users around the world reported that they were unable to open third-party apps.

The issue was linked to Apple’s Gatekeeper technology which runs invisible online checks to ensure that only “trusted” software is running on the device. Since Apple experienced server issues when it launched Big Sur, Gatekeeper was unable to perform these online checks and this prevented user’s third-party apps from opening.

After resolving the issue, Apple subsequently claimed that these online checks “have never included the user’s Apple ID or the identity of their device.” However, the issue made it clear that the technology Apple uses gives it the power to remotely revoke access to the apps users run on their devices.

Google’s Device Lock Controller app

Google recently confirmed that it had developed a device locking app in collaboration with the Kenyan carrier Safaricom. The Device Lock Controller app can be pre-loaded on financed phones and allows credit providers to remotely revoke access to most of the phone’s features if a customer misses payments.

Google hasn’t revealed whether it plans to partner with other companies and allow them to pre-load Device Lock Controller on their devices. But the existence of this technology means that even if Google is currently only allowing Safaricom to use it, it has the potential to expand and become more widely used.

Device locking and the snowball effect

At the moment, device locking technology is in its early stages and isn’t being used as a primary censorship tool. However, the last few years have shown that when new technology is adopted for censorship purposes, it can quickly snowball into a major censorship tool.

If the idea that Big Tech companies would lock users out of their devices based on what they have posted to social media sounds implausible, consider how much the online censorship landscape has changed over the course of just a few years.

Until recently, the idea that a handful of Big Tech companies would censor the apps users have access to via their app stores, ban books, censor the President, or ban dissenting opinions about newsworthy topics (such as a US presidential election or a pandemic) would have sounded absurd.

But mass Big Tech censorship of apps, books, the President, and dissenting opinions is now a reality and advanced technologies are playing an increasingly predominant role when it comes to carrying out this censorship. Automated systems now flag 94% of all the content that’s removed by YouTube and 95% of the content Facebook removes for “hate speech.”

While device locking technology is still in its infancy, the foundations that could transform this new technology into a major censorship tool are already in place. The technology is being used by Big Tech companies that have already shown they’re willing to censor, continued to censor more broadly with each passing year, and leveraged new technology to censor at scale.

If these Big Tech companies continue to embrace new technology as they expand their censorship efforts, then it’s inevitable that device locking technology will be added to their censorship arsenal in the future. And once this technology is part of Big Tech’s censorship apparatus, its use is likely to snowball and rapidly transform device locking into a pervasive censorship tactic.