Also, calling this "E2EE" is against the unwritten rules of the profession.
0: https://www.macworld.com/article/234693/apple-id-adds-recove...
This is surely true no matter how strong the encryption scheme, though. If you share your content with anyone else, then your security is only as strong as theirs.
You have to explicitly enable it.
Apple's documentation needs to be a little clearer on this but the system is basically designed with the accurate notion that the biggest footgun for 90% of users is not "the government was able to access my messages with a warrant" but rather "I lost access to my end to end encrypted messages".
Bit of a broad stroke anyway.
If it's the latter then yes, you can (almost) always choose not to use a service or website. That's a poor argument to defend bad privacy practices.
If it's the former then just disabling iCloud backup does not result in E2E storage of other iCloud data. iCloud photos, drive, etc. are still not E2E.
b) End to end encryption has always meant transport encryption not encryption at rest.
Sure, but if someone in the middle wants to store, then they don’t have anything unencrypted to store. Ultimately it all depends what one defines the “ends” as. In general for backup, both ends are the user. For chat, the sender and recipient. Apple is not an end, but a provider in the middle.
User B screenshots all of those messages and uploads them unencrypted to a random FTP server.
Now replace the random FTP server with iCloud. Or Google Drive. Does that change the nature of the messaging between User A and User B? I would say it doesn't. In fact, WhatsApp does basically the same.
If you think the word "blame" is too morally hot, then we can always go with causal attribution.
b) this is just false; whether the data is at rest or not has nothing to do with the definition of the term. And it is misleading in any case.
b) The etymology of the term has been blurred by WhatsApp referring to it as both transport and encryption at rest. But historically it has not included the latter part.
No, it's not because it is another instance. Someone can have one thing right and another thing wrong. And whatever the true meaning of "E2EE", its use in this case is misleading at best, so I'm pretty sure that the profession does not approve of it.
The user is being used as an excuse: "we compromise your privacy because that user over there wants it". This is not blame in the obvious sense of "it's that user's fault that they lost their data", but it is blame: "the responsibility for this thing isn't ours, the people who wrote the code, but yours."
There's a heck of a lot here which generally feels like a problem where the user isn't ever adequately briefed on what's happening and why, and isn't given reasonable options. People are very familiar with the idea of giving a house key to a friend, but for some reason we don't offer the substantially better options we have in this regard when it comes to encryption.
Whenever someone loses their account the first thing they do is run to the vendor and flip their shit when the vendor is unable to do anything.
I imagine from a business perspective it’s just better to keep access to data, sometimes without nefarious reasons like advertising, rather just keeping customers happy.
They had records of my folks purchasing the laptop, but they argued that state ID's and credit cards can be faked and stolen, and were thus inadequate for their internal security purposes.
And so you can still use the computer just not keep your data.
Those cards are easily forged and there is nothing you can realistically do to prove the laptop is yours without also allowing thieves/criminals to prove it's theirs. And so they have to err on the side of caution.
The onus lies on you to keep backups.
Also, Apple eventually unlocked the laptop.
In this case you are wanting to keep the data as well.
They certainly turn to Apple for help, but I think it's sometimes simply despair and not flipping their shit.
E.g. I was once in an Apple store and the Genius was trying to help someone who, for some inexplicable reason, did everything in the Guest account of her laptop.
The laptop rebooted for some reason (maybe she said OK to install updates?), and she lost the contents of Guest. Which means she lost everything.
Vendors like Apple need to be prepared for all sorts of data loss scenarios. Ordinary users simply don't think about computers the same way as engineers do.
Regardless of the reasoning, if you have this ability, you can and will be compelled to give up that information. Therefore, it is best to not have that information or STFU about being concerned about privacy.
If my memory serves me correct iCloud Backup was designed as such since Day 1 ( iOS 5 ) so Apple could help its customer when they loss their phone. Is there any links to suggest Apple changed their Backup access?
I don't think whoknowswhat11's account (that there was a period where backups were encrypted but it was removed because users didn't want it) is accurate.
I had seen more than a dozen iTunes Backup corruption where the backup is completely useless. And this problem exist even today. And it seems the chances of happening is higher on Windows PC. iCloud isn't without flaws I have seen three iCloud Backup suggesting it is corrupted. But there is often a backup from previous days as iCloud dont overwrite backup. Given the lower chances of happening I had to use iCloud.
I make the odd encrypted local backup just as a recovery point but my RTO is measured in years TBH.
I know someone that got a drive recovered once and they had no idea what BitLocker is. They were pretty happy to have the key saved in their MS account.
However I agree, I heavily use iMessage, it’s convenient because when I used signal I didn’t get notifications.
However, Apple has had the decryption keys server side for ages, and I believe the reason they don’t have E2EE is purely because users don’t store their backup keys, and kick off when they loose all their life that’s stored in iCloud, and it’s just not worth the hassle to the support team, my family is the same with 1Password, they don’t backup their secret key thing, so I have to either store it or restore their account.
Bitlocker doesn’t help in this regard either, you can bypass the mandatory saving section by using print to PDF to store the recovery file to the encrypted drive, essentially locking a safe with the key inside.
People are certainly choosing convenience over privacy in that any backup is preferable to no backup.
However, Apple does not give the option to choose E2E or not so users cannot make that choice of privacy vs convenience. You're assuming that people choosing iCloud over not-iCloud means people do not want E2E. It may be the case that people prefer E2E but this is not evidence of it.
Furthermore, I don't believe iCloud backups were ever E2E and that it was a feature that was removed. Apple states which iCloud services are E2E[0] and these services I'd argue are pretty straightforward to setup and not lose. Most of the time you don't need a recovery key, just to be logged in on another device.
Even if it is the case that most users do not want E2E, there's certainly a large audience (outside of just the HN bubble) that do want it. They could make it optional.
It’s not possible to give up that which you do not have. And the convenience isn’t for the users
Reality - there was a period where the icloud backups created backups that apple did not have access to. Critically, this mean that if you had any of a wide variety of things happen - unless you were very good about key management - your content was lost for good. ALL your photos (which could be heartbreaking) etc.
It turns out this is NOT what people want. They want apple to have access to their content, so when they have a device stolen and don't have a super long recovery key properly saved, they are not hosed.
Same issue BTW with bitlocker on windows. People DO NOT save those recovery keys, even if they should. Microsoft added a way to force a backup into an account admins and others would have access to, thank goodness, because otherwise users there would be hosed as well.