Apple and Privacy: what about iCloud?

Well, according to Joshua Kopstein’s article for Motherboard – Apple Can Still See Your iMessages If You Enable iCloud – when Apple insists that it doesn’t have a decryption key for iMessages, that isn’t altogether the case. He claims that enabling iCloud for backup generates copies ‘encrypted on iCloud using a key controlled by Apple, not you’.

You may not mind Apple having access to your data, but this does suggest leverage for a subpoena. Tim Cook is quoted in an earlier article as saying that:

“If the government laid a subpoena to get iMessages, we can’t provide it. It’s encrypted and we don’t have a key. And so it’s sort of — the door is closed.”

However, this article suggests that the door can still be opened from the inside. In some circumstances, at any rate.

David Harley