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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Apple iCloud privacy policy mirrors Google's. You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud. Apple also regularly gives iCloud data dumps to US government (they approved and delivered data in about 80% of US Government requests in 2017: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/25/apple-second-2017-trans... )

(The exceptions here are iMessage and phone backups which are E2E encrypted.)

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> You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud.

This seems so deliberately wrong that I shouldn’t respond, but I will. Quick and easy synchronization of contacts, calendars, and photos are all features that I appreciate. What’s more, my fearful-of-technology brother tells me how useful they are to him. He mentioned photo sync as a benefit only a few days ago.

"Gain nothing" ... over Google's superior features.

The OP was referring to iCloud vs. Google. Not the features of sync in general.

By "gain" they meant privacy. You gain no privacy... you lose privacy when using iCloud and Apple Calendar

You mentioned the exceptions - both of which didn't happen 5 years ago. Is it crazy to believe that we may have Tarnsap-like storage from Apple in a few years.

Side note: I don't think Apple will ever encrypt iCloud iPhone backups because that would make it difficult to use them (how would you restore an iPhone backup to a new device if your old one was incinerated? Your private key would be gone)

Best I can tell, they already encrypt a whole load more and are ready to encrypt everything. When setting up a new iPhone, I’m asked to enter my Apple ID, password, approve via an existing device, provide 2FA and then provide the PIN or password of that existing device. After all that, access is granted. To me, this suggests they’re already encrypting in such a way that while it may be brute force-able, it’s unlikely to be data they can read by default.

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