I feel Apple has done privacy well in so many cases, that the way this works is really disappointing :-/
(And even if you disable backups, Apple can still read most if not all of your messages, because the persons on the other side of the conversations have not disabled backups)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
https://sneak.berlin/20200604/if-zoom-is-wrong-so-is-apple/
They were going to actually encrypt it, but suddenly had a change of heart after the FBI had a chat with them:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
Having you messages deleted because you forgot your iCloud password is good security but a terrible default.
It's been engrained in them since the 80s and with the growth of Google, it became fun to vilify Apple because of it.
> Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM"[115] "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."[115]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...
Certainly American companies are subjects to warrants and NSLs, but Google (to give one example) had its dark fibre connections between data centres tapped by the NSA. Is that the "participation" that was referred to by the Snowden documents?
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...
* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-re...
* https://venturebeat.com/2013/11/25/level-3-google-yahoo/
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
No, that's a separate thing. They do both. See the "you should use both" slide.
https://github.com/iamcryptoki/snowden-archive/blob/master/d...
As to the apple claims that they didn't participate in PRISM, I think they were just lying. Clapper lied to congress as well, so this isn't unheard of. They would likely have breached their government contract by telling the truth. That being said, them having never heard about the program name might be true because it might not have been known to them under that name, but that's just a detail.
This is clearly indicated on the PRISM Wikipedia page that was linked above.
> PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies.[1][2][3] The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN.[4][5] PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.
As I've said, that's a detail and splitting hairs. If a sentence has multiple interpretations and one of them is true, but you phrase it in a way that most people interpret the sentence in the wrong way, you are intentionally deceiving people. They should have said "we have never heard the name PRISM" or something like this.
With OCSP Stapling the remote web server whose identity you want to assure yourself of periodically gets an up-to-date OCSP answer about its own certificate. When you connect to that server, it gives you the certificate, and the OCSP answer, which assures you that the certificate is still good, and is signed by the Issuer of the certificate.
So, you visit Porn Hub, Porn Hub knows you visited and can reasonably guess it's because you like porn (duh). Porn Hub talks to their CA. The CA knows Porn Hub are Porn Hub and could reasonably guess it's a porn site (duh) but this way the CA doesn't learn that you visited Porn Hub. That's Privacy preserving. Nobody learns anything you'd reasonably expect they shouldn't know.
But how can we apply that to an application on your Mac? If every app reaches out from your Mac to Apple to get OCSP responses, they learn what you have installed, albeit I guess you can avoid telling them when exactly you ran it. This is enormously more costly and not very privacy preserving.
CRL-based ideas are much better for your privacy, although they might cost you some network traffic when the CRL is updated.
Of course one reason for Apple not to want to do CRLs is that they're transparent and Apple is not a very transparent type of company. With OCSP you've got no way to know if and when Apple revoked the certificate for "Obvious Malware II the sequel" or equally for "Very Popular App that Apple says violated an obscure sub-clause of a developer agreement".
But with CRLs it'd be easier for any researcher to monitor periodically for revocations, giving insights that Apple might not like. Do revocations happen only 9-5 Mon-Fri Cupertino time? Are there dozens per hour? Per day? Per Year?