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Comment by auslander | Hacker News Reader

Add Safari for browser, iCloud Drive and iCloud for email, to complete the list.

Unless you live in China. In that case the Chinese government has full unfettered access to your iCloud Drive data and iCloud email.

If you live in China its game over anyway :) Get a VPN, somehow, and create non-Chinese iCloud accounts. Always on VPN is actually a good thing everywhere.

Haha yeah I'm going to get express vpn now thanks to this article. I can also pay with bitcoin! Yes! :)

Good VPN is like treasure hunt :) gist.github.com/kennwhite/1f3bc4d889b02b35d8aa

But ExpressVPN does admit to keeping

> connection logs including the date of the connection (not the time) and the server used. The total amount of data transferred per user is also monitored. ExpressVPN doesn’t log your IP but the connection logs are tied to the user account.[0]

0) https://www.comparitech.com/vpn/vpn-logging-policies/

Always on VPN hinders my productivity. I live in China and sometimes the VPN connection stalls so while the my operating system indicates it is active, packets aren't being sent/received (I'm on macOS/iOS). Resetting my VPN connection does the trick, but my point is that VPNs aren't stable in China. I need them but I'm annoyed when data isn't pushed/pulled when I expect it to be.

Even in US, Apple regularly gives data dumps to US government. iCloud DOES NOT have the same privacy guarantees than iMessage and similar. The iCloud Privacy Policy closely mirrors Googles.

Here's the report - Apple gave data to US government in 80% of requests in 2017: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/25/apple-second-2017-trans...

In the words of Lisa Jackson, VP at Apple:

Please know that Apple will continue its work with law enforcement. We share law enforcement's concerns about the threat to citizens and we work closely with authorities to comply with legal requests for data that have helped solve complex crimes. Thousands of times every month, we give governments information about Apple customers and devices, in response to warrants and other forms of legal process. We have a team that responds to those requests 24 hours a day. Strong encryption does not eliminate Apple’s ability to give law enforcement meta-data or any of a number of other very useful categories of data.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/58380

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