Hacker News Reader

Comment by bugfix | Hacker News Reader

So why not give users the option to encrypt everything if they want to?

I'm convinced that if you give the general public the "encrypt everything option", then too many people will opt in without being aware of the consequences. They will eventually forget their password, loose all their family photos and blame Apple for it. A disclaimer also wouldn't help here.

If anything, this should be some hidden developder mode kind of option to make sure that only those opt in who know what they are doing.

Then you make them aware of those consequences. This is solvable.

Users don't read, they smash Ok buttons without understanding.

Make them sign several clauses on a contract and send back a scanned copy. Really, if they still go through it without understanding what they are doing it will be on them.

Signed copies protect you from litigation in court, not loss of brand value in the court of public opinion. Plenty of people bitten by it will just never use a backup product from you again, and every time apple sneezes a flurry of journalists are there to document it.

I guess the idea here is to make enabling the option enough of a pain so that only people who need it are going to use it, and button smashers will be spared.

In this case, should we also ban power tools and heavy machinery because some idiots aren't careful and get hurt?

No, but it’s perfectly fine for a company to not want to be in the table/chain saw industry if they have a brand identity around “just works.”

It’s unfortunate because apple has the cash and panache to take it mainstream, but they probably don’t have any market incentive to do so, at least until someone else figures out the ux that doesn’t cut clueless user fingers off.

This seems uncharitable. Most people can intuitively understand the danger of a table saw. Just the sound alone sends a shiver up your spine even if you aren't a woodworking expert.

But we've conditioned users to accept a million dialog boxes to confirm random choices that are mostly inconsequential CYA.

The analogy isn't helpful because you're actively aware of the dangerous machine when you're close to it, whereas losing a password is something you unintentionally do because you forgot about it 6 months after setting it up. A better analogy would be ammonia refrigerators that occasionally leaked and killed people in their sleep, which are banned.

Make it difficult to find unless the person is actively looking for it.

Apple’s ultimate goal is to sell iPhones, not solve privacy unfortunately. Why would they invest in a feature they actively hide and discourage users from using? They can’t put it in the keynote as a feature to buy an iPhone, and then hide it from all the users they just advertised to.

So you ask them multiple times. You remind them via mail every n months. I repeat this is solvable. If people chose willingly ignore multiple warnings, then it's their fault.

Don't assume your users are immature just because they use a computer. This assumption is only with computers, I don't know why.

I like this "There are things you can do".

If the easy/simple first idea after giving it zero seconds of thought isn't good enough, the possibility actually exists to give it more than zero seconds of thought and try more than one thing.

It's also possible that the simple warning does work just fine, after it's ubiquitous for a while.

Everything about a computer was baffling originally, and now grandma scans documents to create pdfs and attaches them to emails. She's still grandma, she stil is baffled by many things, but there is a whole pretty big body of good understanding that she DOES have, just like she knows how to operate many other parts of her life.

The irreversable nature of protected data could perfectly well become one of these things that everyone knows.

All it probably requires is simply being a feature of ordinary life for some amount of time.

And maybe a little more standardization around terminology and ui so that people can tell when they are dealing with a secure thing vs an ordinary thing.

The set of customers who will both understand the consequences and still opt in is so small I think apple is comfortable letting someone else take that market, unfortunately.

This.

I'm pretty convinced the proportion of people who would be likely to expect Apple to be able to recover from a lost password, even though they'd specifically opted out of that, would tend to ~100% of any group of users (not just Apple users).

Many people think "The Internet" is their browser (Oh, mum, [sigh]). Try to explain public key cryptography consequences to them, I dog-dare you. If Betty (Oh, Betty, [deep sigh]) from next door said it was "better" then they'll go for it anyway, and only pay attention to the consequences when it's too late.

The article is a year old, and I think Apple could do some stuff around what they already do (if you forget your password on one device, you can typically reset it using the password from another device, all the while maintaining the cryptography chain). There's some interesting avenues that could be explored there, but until they have a solid-as-they-can-make-it public release-candidate, we won't hear anything about it.

but then again, who's going to be using it? A sibling comment mentioned that you can still do local backups which are encrypted and don't leave your device. What's the intersection of people who cares about their backup being encrypted, but can't set up itunes sync on their computer?

I would use it because I like the convenience of iCloud backup and not having to ever plug my phone into anything.

>and not having to ever plug my phone into anything.

works over wifi too. https://www.switchingtomac.com/tutorials/ios-tutorials/backu...

Is that still accurate? You don't use iTunes to sync the phone anymore and I don't think the encrypted backups could be done via WiFi. If that's changed, then that's awesome.

That's essentially what backing up to your Mac instead of iCloud gets you. The data is encrypted with your key to a device that you control.

I worked in education and had teachers and administration who were smart people, consistently asking to have their passwords reset. And the only requirement we had was that it needed to be 8 chars long, no special chars or capitalization. (This was a result of students and staff not being able to remember their passwords for more than a day or two)

I can't imagine needing a password for them to recover photos and messages.

Because of the FBI, obviously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com