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Comment by shard | Hacker News Reader

"Apple is moving some of the personal data of Chinese customers to a data center in Guiyang that is owned and operated by the Chinese government. State employees physically manage the facility and servers and have direct access to the data stored there; Apple has already abandoned encryption in China due to state limitations that render it ineffective."

https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/icloud-data-turned-...

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I really dislike that there is so much social control :( In theory is to protect you. In practice it can and is misused in so many ways that it should not be even allowed without a judge authorization.

You're kind of missing the point. The Chinese government has unlimited social control. Even if there was some sort of written law in China requiring judicial oversight, that wouldn't limit social control because the judiciary is just a rubber stamp.

Apple has abandoned encryption for everyone in iCloud. You cannot encrypt anything except a limited subset of your device's data (Apple Health data, mostly.)

In Apple's defense E2E encryption also makes it a lot easier to get locked out of your photos and device backups.

IMHO it should still be an option but only as part of Lockdown Mode, with the explicit caveat that turning it on risks losing data.

That may be true, but Reuters reported that Apple had a plan for it (which means they felt it was workable) and dropped it due to pressure from FBI/DOJ.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Also, there are many users who would benefit from e2ee iCloud backups who are not targets of NSO Group-type attacks, so I don't think it makes sense to make it only available in "Lockdown Mode".

I was all prepared to answer this with "so Reuters reporting something makes it true?", only to discover that, in fact, Reuters reported no such thing.

Reuters makes two claims:

1) The FBI talked to Apple (duh) 2) An unannounced plan to implement fully E2EE backups was no longer discussed with the FBI at their next meeting

Both of those things might be true! Reuters isn't known for just making stuff like this up, like, say Bloomberg, but the article specifically says:

"When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan."

So we've got an unannounced product, which the FBI didn't like, which Apple stopped talking to the FBI about (according to some leakers at the FBI).

This does not add up to "Apple dropped plans due to pressure from [the] FBI/DOJ". It adds up to "secretive company discusses plans with secretive agency, and some stuff about that conversation leaked".

I would suggest that if you're doing anything illegal in the country you're staying in, turn off icloud sync at the least, and best policy is don't use an iphone but use an android with an open source operating system like graphene OS

> In Apple's defense E2E encryption also makes it a lot easier to get locked out of your photos and device backups.

This is likely the real reason E2E hasn't been done yet. I would wager Apple deals with orders of magnitude more people who are locked out of their phones than the number impacted by the lack of E2E backups. Trusted recovery contact added in the last iOS version is a step in a direction of providing some way to implement E2E, and still give people a way to recover.

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