<story><title>Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303#advanced</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sneed-oil</author><text>&amp;gt; seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone&amp;#x2F;os&amp;#x2F;service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river.&lt;p&gt;Their software is not open source. Before this announcement you had to trust Apple not to look into the files you store in the cloud, now you have to trust that they&amp;#x27;re actually going to encrypt your files and not save the decryption key. Ultimately you still have to trust Apple.
A combination of any open source OS, any cloud provider and Cryptomator or Veracrypt wouldn&amp;#x27;t require as much trust in one company.</text></item><item><author>ir77</author><text>this announcement is huge in multiple ways:&lt;p&gt;1) they just ate every other 3rd party &amp;quot;secure&amp;quot; backup services lunch just like they did to the Hi-Res music industry.&lt;p&gt;2) details of what they backup securely, besides photos (which is top priority for me): iCloud Drive: Includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents, PDFs, Safari downloads, or any other files manually or automatically saved to iCloud Drive.&lt;p&gt;3)&lt;i&gt;BUT&lt;/i&gt;, perhaps the &lt;i&gt;BIGGEST&lt;/i&gt; news here is that Apple is making a backup statement to what they&amp;#x27;ve been saying for years and what they&amp;#x27;ve recently gotten negative attention on: They don&amp;#x27;t want your data.  They&amp;#x27;re not Goodle&amp;#x2F;FB&amp;#x2F;Amazon.  They&amp;#x27;re giving you 2TB+ of space and you can encrypt it to the point that you&amp;#x27;ll lose your data and they don&amp;#x27;t care -- they don&amp;#x27;t want to mine your data, they don&amp;#x27;t want to know what you store on there, the don&amp;#x27;t care to scan your pictures with AI 20 different ways, they don&amp;#x27;t want to monetize it, etc, etc.,  just pay them money for their service and transactionally they give you only thing that you want in return -- reliable, secure, private service.&lt;p&gt;seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone&amp;#x2F;os&amp;#x2F;service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ubermonkey</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re trusting somebody no matter how you do it unless you own all the hardware that supports your ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;The Free Software world has had ample opportunity to produce something as carefully assembled, as smooth, and as capable as iOS, and what we got instead was Android.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve watched the whole FOSS world happen in my career, and there are places where I cannot IMAGINE choosing a closed source solution, given my druthers. But it&amp;#x27;s also become super clear to me that the FOSS world isn&amp;#x27;t interested in producing polished user experiences. Sure, &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; could cobble together a FOSS-only phone-and-syncing stack, I guess, but I don&amp;#x27;t care to. Most people aren&amp;#x27;t us; doing so is beyond them.&lt;p&gt;Suggesting a normal person use something OTHER than iOS at this point is questionable at best.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303#advanced</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sneed-oil</author><text>&amp;gt; seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone&amp;#x2F;os&amp;#x2F;service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river.&lt;p&gt;Their software is not open source. Before this announcement you had to trust Apple not to look into the files you store in the cloud, now you have to trust that they&amp;#x27;re actually going to encrypt your files and not save the decryption key. Ultimately you still have to trust Apple.
A combination of any open source OS, any cloud provider and Cryptomator or Veracrypt wouldn&amp;#x27;t require as much trust in one company.</text></item><item><author>ir77</author><text>this announcement is huge in multiple ways:&lt;p&gt;1) they just ate every other 3rd party &amp;quot;secure&amp;quot; backup services lunch just like they did to the Hi-Res music industry.&lt;p&gt;2) details of what they backup securely, besides photos (which is top priority for me): iCloud Drive: Includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents, PDFs, Safari downloads, or any other files manually or automatically saved to iCloud Drive.&lt;p&gt;3)&lt;i&gt;BUT&lt;/i&gt;, perhaps the &lt;i&gt;BIGGEST&lt;/i&gt; news here is that Apple is making a backup statement to what they&amp;#x27;ve been saying for years and what they&amp;#x27;ve recently gotten negative attention on: They don&amp;#x27;t want your data.  They&amp;#x27;re not Goodle&amp;#x2F;FB&amp;#x2F;Amazon.  They&amp;#x27;re giving you 2TB+ of space and you can encrypt it to the point that you&amp;#x27;ll lose your data and they don&amp;#x27;t care -- they don&amp;#x27;t want to mine your data, they don&amp;#x27;t want to know what you store on there, the don&amp;#x27;t care to scan your pictures with AI 20 different ways, they don&amp;#x27;t want to monetize it, etc, etc.,  just pay them money for their service and transactionally they give you only thing that you want in return -- reliable, secure, private service.&lt;p&gt;seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone&amp;#x2F;os&amp;#x2F;service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rollcat</author><text>Acceptable security afforded today - through usability - is better than superior security, that could&amp;#x27;ve theoretically been gained, but wasn&amp;#x27;t, because it was too difficult to set things up.&lt;p&gt;In particular, reviewing open source code has been repeatedly proven to be way harder of a task, than the proponents of this strategy are painting it to be. If you want an auditable codebase, you pretty much have to throw Linux, Chromium&amp;#x2F;Firefox, Gnome&amp;#x2F;KDE all out the window - there&amp;#x27;s just way too much code.&lt;p&gt;Auditable code is naturally always preferable to non-auditable, but you need to choose your trade-offs - or at least stop pretending you can read a hundred million lines in your life time.&lt;p&gt;On top of that - do you know a single non-tech person who knows how to set up a VPS, or knows what Veracrypt is? OTOH I can just show my wife: click here to enable backups.&lt;p&gt;Let me reframe the problem: What is your threat model? How much effort are you willing to commit to mitigate the dangers?</text></comment>