Apple has done a fantastic PR job regarding privacy. I am more skeptical about the status of actual privacy given their iMessage situation and now this.
> 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.
(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.