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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> One of my friends is highly skeptical of Apple's privacy and who will have access to this data, but as far as I can tell Apple does not have access to, or share health data with anyone.

By default, the data stays on your device or is encrypted end-to-end if you store it in iCloud. A while back you could share your heart data for a health study, but you had to opt in.

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That's what I thought, I was trying to find information on their policies about metadata collection or anything like that, I didn't spend much time looking though.

But given Apple's stance and track record with privacy I'd be amazed if they violated that with health data.

Once it's in the cloud, the government (NSA) can read it on demand, encryption or not.

Edit: "No one else, not even Apple, can access end-to-end encrypted information." Strong words, and AES-128, maybe I was wrong.

They can't if the only keys to access it are on your device, unless there's a fundamental flaw in how our cryptography is supposed to work.

> unless there's a fundamental flaw in our cryptography

They compromised elliptic curves. Otherwise it depends on what Apple uses for encryption.

"A minimum of 128-bit AES": https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Source?

If this is your argument, then nothing on this planet is secure or safe from the NSA. Take into account the speculative execution related flaws, like Spectre and Meltdown, found in all major CPUs (including ARM based ones), nothing is unbreakable.

There are many encryption methods safe from the NSA, but you are right, once they attack the CPU backbones almost nothing on the market is unbreakable.

If that were true you would lose access to it if you lost your phone, which you don’t.

Source?

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