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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

A lot of iMessage user angst around this boils down to "how dare other folks have the privilege of blue bubbles without paying for them"

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No it’s because I’m not sure if the messages I send to them can be easily harvested. Same goes for photos I have shared. Maybe it’s naked photos. Maybe they are photos which show me doing something considered illegal. Idk let’s say I’m speeding on my private road and I send the video which seen out of context is damaging to me.

When the user uses iMessage I can be sure if it leaks - he was either hacked or shared the photo. If he uses a 3rd party client MY data can now be harvested by the 3rd party without my consent or knowledge. The knowledge is the key here because apart from the original 2 reasons for a leak now it’s also the other option of 3rd party app harvesting data.

Get China as an investor is a year or two and… now my data 100% will be harvested.

Yes, because there are no zero-click attacks known for iMessage...

> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/apple-zero-cl...

OP said: > When the user uses iMessage I can be sure if it leaks - he was either hacked or shared the photo

I would call that a hack.

Don't worry, Apple's harvesting your data these days as well. More importantly though, end to end encryption means Beepers servers never see the videos of you breaking the law, but if you're truly paranoid, the closed nature of iMessage should scare you because we don't know that the NSA doesn't have decryption keys - iMessage in China is not run by Apple, which means the CCP has decryption keys for messages sent in China; who's to say theres not a similar arrangement with the US intelligence community. I'm not remotely Edward Snowden but if that's your worry, I wouldn't trust iMessage either.

My worry in this case is not the government it’s the unsecured rooted Android devices will malware.

When I want to have secure conversations I either do IRL or Signal on iOS devices.

I already get increasing iMessage spam (e.g. random “hello”). I don’t love the idea of opening the door to a large population of additional users unless they are subjected to equivalent abuse controls. And I can’t tell from the discussion so far whether that’d be true or not.

Having worked on large scale fraud systems before, the only controls that work are those where users are risking something of value when they commit abuse. A paid account with a lot of valuable history is great. Banning a free and easy to replace/farm account is useless.

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