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Comment by QasimK | Hacker News Reader

I really have to applaud Apple for doing these things on the device instead of on their cloud servers. They respect your privacy far more than most large tech companies (I would just say “they respect your privacy, others don’t”.)

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how would they do on the server? no internet connection = cant use the phone?

I don't have the time at the moment to check whether or not Apple uses this approach, however, Google went about solving offline-functionality in a clever way. https://research.googleblog.com/2015/07/how-google-translate...

That’s exactly why I prefer on-device computation! The internet is not always available

there's such a thing as a pin. people keep forgetting.

What are the privacy implications of doing this vs. something like Google Photos? I mean iCloud also has my pictures.

They discuss photo and video storage on iCloud specifically:

> Apple’s iCloud Photo Library is a cloud-based solution for photo and video storage. However, due to Apple’s strong commitment to user privacy, we couldn’t use iCloud servers for computer vision computations. Every photo and video sent to iCloud Photo Library is encrypted on the device before it is sent to cloud storage, and can only be decrypted by devices that are registered with the iCloud account.

So if I throw out all my Apple devices and forget my current iCloud password, the photos are gone?

Or does Apple store the encryption key for me somewhere as a convenience, so that once I get new decides and reset my iCloud password, I regain access?

They’re gone

That's messed up and makes it certain that I will never use iCloud. Losing my family photos is a much worse outcome than having them accessed by a hacker.

That is what you get when you want real privacy protection, no one but you should be able to access that data. That being said, iCloud is not really a backup, just a File Storage with syncing features, you should get another service (internal or external) to backup your data like Backblaze or a NAS.

Apple allows you to reset your password if you forget it. This feature is why it can respond to subpoenas for iCloud data like iMessages.

It's an unfortunate tradeoff.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket

OK cool. That's what I was hoping.

What do you want to happen if you lose all your devices? Backup your damn data.

But that could technically be encrypted and still provide the same set of features.

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