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China Decides iPhones Pose a National Security Risk
(www.pcmag.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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They haven’t reduced their privacy stance, as far as I’m aware. In fact, the only public previous reduction was a concession to China over iCloud storage
And if you really want full privacy, storing data in Apple’s cloud storage was never ideal. Apple, like many other cloud storage companies, hands cloud storage data over to authorities if they’re given a warrant.
On-device storage is a different story though. Apple has a no backdoor policy for the iPhone and iOS, which is why they’re constantly getting into fights with law enforcement and government agencies. On device backdoors would offer a massive security vulnerability that would be exploited by bad actors.
Apple does have some advantages, in that you can enable encryption of your data so that Apple doesn't have anything to turn over.
But yeah, I still wouldn't recommend them because they could disable that tomorrow.
Even if they disabled E2E, the data would still be encrypted, and they wouldn't have the key to force it to decrypt. Also, removing that feature would royally piss off their customers that they sold "security" to for a decade+.
Personally, I use their cloud storage. IMHO, the risk is low and the convenience is worth it for me, as someone in the US.
Since it's all closed-source, we don't really know that. Apple also controls the OS of your device so they could easily push an update that sends your key to their server.
Apple has many privacy issues, but this ain't one of them, in my opinion.