I’ve come to this conclusion. So what are my options since Apple keeps such tight control on everything? Plug in nightly to iTunes or libimobiledevice? Stand up an iTunes server for LAN backups requiring Windows or macOS? What about the 30-40% of nights I’m on the road?

I’m all for ditching iCloud for backups but Apple has made it really inconvenient to do automated backups with anything but iCloud. Libimobiledevice is slowly working towards LAN backups so we’re getting there but then I’m still in need of mDNS reflection to make it happen over WAN.

I’ve made efforts into tying as much of my data to self-hosted solutions as possible but full device backup on your own hardware is still a gaping hole in the iOS ecosystem.

They could put a clear warning on the iCloud screen as well. However, there is a large market for the iPhone in non-tech savvy people, especially old people, who may not understand fully what this decision means.

People can, will, do, and did ignore any and all warning messages and then look to support to help them. It does not seem to matter how large, scary, or clear the warnings are. They will be ignored.

So if you're Google or Apple and want to ensure that people's identity documents or tax records or business documents aren't stolen when the laptop or phone is, you make encryption the default. It helps that these devices are easier to sell to businesses. I'm thankful for these choices.

In my professional capacity as an information security practitioner and my personal capacity as a privacy advocate, I find the idea at hand distasteful. Improved security should be available to everyone, not just those with a deep grasp of how to manage cryptographic keys. Gaining any measure of data security should not be reserved solely for us in the technical elite.

There might, perhaps, be a slightly different discussion to be had about making it more common for tools to enable advanced users to manage their own keys. But this should never come at the expense of the common user. We have a profound professional responsibility to be better than that.

Many people assume that that when it says "can't", it actually means "won't", and that they'll be able to beg or browbeat support into helping them.

I can also already see the argument: "but that's not my data, it's in My Documents, it's a document so it shouldn't be encrypted!"

Communicating these things to users is hard because when it comes to computers, the lexicon is often personal. What one user calls My Documents might refer to the My Documents collection in Windows, and another one might mean a random folder they created that they put documents in. It's basically impossible to get everyone on the same lexicon, although it's getting better as young kids grow up with computers.

As someone who very much doesn't use iCloud for exactly this reason, I'd have a lot more sympathy with that argument if Apple didn't push everyone towards iCloud and the accompanying insecurity while simultaneously making it much more difficult than it needs to be to move your data between, onto and off Apple devices in other, more secure ways.