In a worrying move, Apple has patented technology that’ll allow venues to disable people’s iPhone cameras at live events. Benedict Cumberbatch will be pleased.

With social media comes the possibility — nay, the expectation — of sharing everything you experience with the world. Whether it’s a fancy dinner, a concert, a sports game, a movie or a theater performance, you want to prove that you’ve been there. Sometimes, you want to broadcast your experience live, allowing friends and fellow fans to share the moment with you.

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Not only do phones now come with HD cameras, but apps like Snapchat, Instagram and Periscope encourage users to stream and document experiences as they happen.

This is great for the global online community, and bad for the entertainment industry, which is finding it almost impossible to combat pirating of shows and movies (we’re sure there are Hamilton and Cursed Child bootlegs out there, for example).

Further, many artists — including Benedict Cumberbatch and Adele — have expressed their annoyance at our generation’s tendency to experience everything through their phone screens, focusing on taking pictures and video to share later rather than the performance happening right in front of them.

Venues have long been fighting to combat what The Huffington Post calls, “annoying smartphone behavior,” and as a proud member of the pre-digital Millennial generation, this writer can personally attest to longing for the days in which we were able to be physically present in real life, as opposed to always sticking our noses in our phones and disappearing into the interwebz.

Now, presumably in an effort to appease disgruntled artists, and to assist venues in clamping down on phone photography in places where it has been forbidden, Apple has patented a new technology that’ll allow venues to use an infared beam to disable phone cameras.

As opposed to simply interfering with the image (which wouldn’t feel as intrusive), this technology would actually interact with the phone, and when someone attempted to use the camera, they’d get a “recording disabled” message on their screens. (Apple is also considering forcing a watermark or blur effect.)

This is one of those technology clampdown initiatives that sound well and good in theory, but obviously raise huge concerns. Speaking only about entertainment-related events now, policies vary from event to event about whether photography and filming is discouraged or expressly forbidden (resulting in the culprit’s expulsion from the theater, or even a fine).

Making this technology available to venues, presumably indiscriminately, wouldn’t necessarily mean that attendees couldn’t record whatever was happening on stage. What if they want to take selfies, or pictures of their friends, or keep in contact with loved ones? It might be considered bad form, but should venues have the right to make it impossible?

On a sidenote, this disabling also wouldn’t necessarily result in an attentive audience, as they’d presumably still have the ability to live tweet the experience, or record audio.

Putting a blanket shut-down on key phone features just feels uncomfortably controlling, although the sentiment of wanting to bring back the ‘pure’ event experience from the pre-smartphone days is obviously a sympathetic one.

But the real issue comes when you look beyond the entertainment industry. As The Telegraph notes, once this technology exists, who’s to stop it being misused to prohibit citizens from documenting oppression, or to use their phones in formerly ‘free’ spaces? Surely it won’t take long before museums, art exhibitions and fancy restaurants will wish to incorporate similar technology to purify visitors’ experiences and protect their venue-specific properties. And from there, there’s no way to ensure that this technology will only be used for benign, artistic preservation reasons.

Coming up to Comic-Con, we’re obviously wondering whether an implementation at panels would make big distributors more likely to showcase exclusives. This brings up a whole other debate, about global fandom and increasingly blurred lines between the expectation of fandom experiences being instantly available worldwide, and the entertainment industry desire to keep people interested in attending live events.

But that’s a discussion for another day! For now, let’s just wonder if Apple’s plans to give venues the power of remotely shutting down phone functions is a smart idea, or if it’s opening up the possibility for a major invasion of privacy and a limitation on our freedom of expression.