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EFF Report Highlights Apple's Efforts to Protect Consumer Data, Increase Transparency
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Same reaction here. I was thinking oh well done Apple, until I got to the last sentence, shook my head, and figured the whole thing is worth naught.
Unfortunately not even Steve Jobs would have been able to do anything about PRISM. FISA court orders are court orders - the company must obey them. I don't know what the penalties for non-compliance are, but they could involve large fines or jail time.
Ultimately it wouldnt' even matter if you obeyed the court order or not - the NSA's MUSCULAR programme collected twice as much data as PRISM by tapping the internal links between Google and Yahoo's data centres. Because it happened outside of the USA, MUSCULAR didn't require a warrant and the companies didn't even know it was happening. The best way for these companies to protect their users' privacy is to limit what they collect and store in the first place.
However - Apple has made the information on their security infrastructure public so it's open to scrutiny. iMessage's design (pages 20-21) in particular is impressive - it has true end-to-end encryption. When you send an iMessage to somebody, it is encrypted specifically for every one of their devices and sent individually so that only those specific devices can read them. They are always stored in their original encrypted form on Apple's servers (including attachments), and deleted as soon as they are delivered. The NSA - or Apple, for that matter - couldn't read your iMessages even if they got them from the servers or listened to them over-the-wire.
iMessage is about as secure as you could possibly build a messaging service. I can't think of anything you could add to make it more secure than it is.
You could just look at the criteria. The entire thing is reasonably transparent.
10 bucks says NSA can read everyone's iMessage. They just send a FISA court request for the encryption keys. Or 1 of million more ways to read them. http://mashable.com/2013/10/17/apple-nsa-imessage/
While this report seems encouraging it doesn't really tell us anything we don't already know.
![appleeffgoldstars.jpg]()
The six points for which they receive stars have been fairly well documented over the last year or so. Nothing new here.
This report does not say anything about what the NSA or any other snoop agency could do without Apple's knowledge or consent. You can't stop them from monitoring/intercepting/analyzing data traffic etc.
As an aside, some people here seem to confuse compliance with government requests/demands with what companies like Google themselves do with the data they collect. This report is not about that, only about how they interact with government orders.
What companies like Google do with the data they collect...well that is still entirely unregulated and really up to them.
The six points for which they receive stars have been fairly well documented over the last year or so. Nothing new here.
This report does not say anything about what the NSA or any other snoop agency could do without Apple's knowledge or consent. You can't stop them from monitoring/intercepting/analyzing data traffic etc.
As an aside, some people here seem to confuse compliance with government requests/demands with what companies like Google themselves do with the data they collect. This report is not about that, only about how they interact with government orders.
What companies like Google do with the data they collect...well that is still entirely unregulated and really up to them.
I think you meant to say "Apple, you ARE NWA"
YES! it is true.....they are real...so real to the community....they want to beat us down and demonstrate public distrust.
That's a rather stupid remark. Google's _business_ is to collect data about you and sell it advertisers. Apple collects data as required to conduct business with you. If Google and Apple collected the same data, then the only people that Google knew anything about would be their advertisers, who they conduct business with. So all the advertisers could happily advertise to each other.
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10 bucks says the can't. And Apple doesn't have the encryption keys for iMessage. Actually, in the link itself they said that their claim (Apple and NSA can read iMessage) is nonsense.
Yes. But my point is if you have a survey of this nature and both google and apple ace it then you have learnt nothing. Because Apple and Google are light years apart in terms of how they treat customers personal data.
I thought it was about Google's use of customer data, but yeah this predominantly covers things from a fairly broad standpoint.
Blah Blah Blah
I'd like to believe the EFF is more than just a liberal hack organization, but can't. It's taken Snowden, and one lawless act after another by the Obama administration for people like them tostop bashing pause blaming Bush long enough to start paying attention to the greater threat to our personal liberties today. And some STILL will blindly ignore the truth.
It's interesting that a shill report from EFF like this comes out. The naive and incredibly stupid clap their hands like seals at EFF and Apple's "transparency". Meanwhile, the rest of us have long known personal privacy was irrevocably compromised years ago.
#WakeUpIdiots
I'd like to believe the EFF is more than just a liberal hack organization, but can't. It's taken Snowden, and one lawless act after another by the Obama administration for people like them to
It's interesting that a shill report from EFF like this comes out. The naive and incredibly stupid clap their hands like seals at EFF and Apple's "transparency". Meanwhile, the rest of us have long known personal privacy was irrevocably compromised years ago.
#WakeUpIdiots
Apple collects a lot of data and they tout having the largest collection of credit card numbers on file. However, the question is not how much they collect, but what they do with it. Apple does not scan my emails or vmails like google or yahoo. Apple does not track my keystrokes like Facebook does. But they know a lot about me based on my purchases in iTunes, on the app stores, what movies I have rented etc.
What makes Apple better, IMO, is that they do not provide my profile to other companies. A story a while back ago on this site specifically called out how some advertisers did not like that Apple would not give them info on their users. Instead, Apple says, tell me whom you want to target and we will make sure your ad gets to the target. In other words, my profile stays within the walls. To me, that is significant compared to the others where my profile goes beyond the walls and proliferates in the wild.
This is why I am not a fan of anything google. They have great products and they claim to give a lot of it away for free like Gmail and their office suite. However the cost in terms of my profile and personal habits that are made available to others is much higher than the with Apple that also gives me mail and an office suite for free but does not make my profile available to others.
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No, I'm sorry but you're wrong. The article you posted was written before Apple documented how iMessage works, and is quite simply nothing more than click bait - they say that iMessage could be compromised if Apple compromised their own systems (wow, really?).
Not only that, but it contains some misleading information about how iMessage works. Apple does not store all the encryption keys - they store a device's public key, which can only be used to encrypt messages to be decrypted with the device's own private key (this key is never stored on Apple's servers). The way public-key cryptography works is that the public key is only valid for one transaction - i.e. you can write data with the public key which can be read by the private key, but the public key can't decrypt data that it itself encrypted. In other words - having the encrypted data and the key which was used to encrypt it is not enough to decrypt the data.
What that article says is that Apple could theoretically give you a fake public key (e.g. the key of some NSA spying device), which would then receive and forward the messages to the target. That would only affects messages you send after they install the tap - anything you've already sent (including anything stored on Apple's servers for up to 7 days waiting for delivery) would remain unretrievable.
Apple have absolutely no legal obligation to install that kind of tap to facilitate NSA eavesdropping. They may have to hand over any stored information that they have, but they do not have to modify their systems to introduce backdoors. Obviously they can, if they want, compromise their own systems - but realistically it would be a cold day in Hell before they voluntarily do something like that.
That's a very, very important point. US law can force Apple to hand over information that they have. There are also laws that can force Apple under some circumstances to be quiet about these things. There are no laws that could ever force Apple to collect information or make it possible to collect information, and there are no laws that could force Apple to lie about things.
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It's about protecting your privacy _against the government_. Now with Dropbox I would seriously expect them to keep my data private against anybody (including Dropbox), because that's their business. Facebook and Google, less so.
Awesome. Even though all these companies got the same rating, we are somehow twisting this into Google still being worse. What you state above, the quantity of data, was not the basis of this article.
You're right. Nothing can be taken seriously when Google and Apple are rated the same. Give me a break.
i feel like some people are conflating privacy in the report with regards to what the government has and what each individual corporation has. apple, google, etc all collect info obviously. the report is telling us what steps apple in particular has done to keep our info out of government hands. nothing says they don't collect and use it for themselves, that's another matter entirely. this report is just about the EFF's monitoring giant tech corps with regards to them keeping our info away from the government.
That chart begs the question: What the hell was going on from 2011-2013?
Poor analysis by EFF.