I do make one exception to this, in that I have a long-standing business arrangement with a company that manages my mail and web server, but I am paying them for a specific service which they have been completely reliable about providing, so I feel generally comfortable with that.

I feel badly for people who haven't had the advantage of growing up with all this stuff and are therefore having to learn these lessons the hard way. Lots of painful experiences out there.

It seems like there aren't very many people who really care about privacy... and they would be easy to single out and punish.

On that note, enjoy your semblance of privacy now... while you still can!

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.de/video-china-train-warns-citiz...

But what's the definition of "other peoples' machines?"

If you run Windows 10, it's not really your machine. You don't have full control over it, do you? It updates and reboots when Microsoft tells it to, not when you tell it to.

If you use a smartphone, that's not your machine, either. If you can't read and write every byte of storage from the baseband processor to the video chipset, but the company who sold you the phone can, then that means it's their machine, and not yours.

If you use a Linux box or a Mac, I hope you never plug an Ethernet cable into it, because that effectively turns your machine into a dumb terminal on a system that isn't yours, just as the Oracle (Corporation) foretold.

"Keeping it to yourself" gets a little less practical every year, it seems.

My devices all connect to a wifi router at home that I bought and configured myself, which bridges to my ISP's modem. Has it been hacked...? Well, I hope not. I do the best I can. My laptops have all been ThinkPads running Linux, for years. I love the maintainability, and the fact that I can turn off wifi with a physical switch is a nice bonus. I'd like to try out a Purism laptop someday, if I can ever afford it.

I take comfort in the fact that nobody really cares what I am doing and I am not worth the effort of a focused attack. If I ever got involved in politics or activism, I might manage my risks differently. It is frustrating for me that the world continues to drift further away from the way I'd prefer it to be, in this arena, but my desires are extreme, so I suppose that's to be expected.

Also, in China Apple handed over iCloud operations to a government owned company, including the keys.

By implication, all other data is not end-to-end encrypted. That includes iCloud drive, photos, calendar, contacts and mail.

Specifically listed as encrypted in transit and on server:

- iCloud Drive

- Photos

- Calendar

- Contacts

Only mail is not according to this support article.

Edit: I see the omission now. These things are not listed under the end-to-end section.

It reads "For certain sensitive information, Apple uses end-to-end encryption. This means that only you can access your information" and then immediate shows a giant table of data that is NOT end-to-end encrypted, but not labelled as such -- it's only inferrable by its omissions from the next section of the document.

How can you be sure? End to end encryption is not a guarantee when you're inputting your key into a closed source client to store and retrieve the data.

or can't seem to differentiate between what Google does now ...vs what might happen with Apple in the future.

Also, I didn't say anything about what Apple might or might not do in the future. I made a distinction between worries about ad targeting and security issues that come with storing data in the cloud without end-to-end encryption.