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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

It's a dual facing problem. Not only do users have no defence against google snooping, but google has no defence against requests to snoop: Apple seems to drive harder to "we'd help if we could, but we can't: to us its just blobs"

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Apple regularly gives up customers' private data when requested, and they keep logs of it themselves[1].

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

So far apple has not been compelled by the courts to make a tool so they could decrypt the e2e stuff which now pretty much includes all iCloud content. As far as we publicly know.

Prior to ADP, agencies like FBI could actually access a lot of information from Apple, primarily because Apple stored keys alongside your data. Which meant even though iMessage content was encrypted (and therefore useless), they could still get a lot of information from a request to Apple -- and Apple hands over quite a lot. FBI had a document all about that in 2021.

Also important to note, ADP is opt-in currently.

But Apple now has Advanced Data Protection that add E2EE for majority of iCloud data and they only keep keys on your devices. Not that I have absolute trust in Apple, but Google don't even have that.

Google had that four years before Advanced Data Protection existed. https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/google-and-android-h...

Warning: this blog post has meaningless marketing-speak. It starts by saying Android is about choice but instead of announcing the ability to set your own backup provider, it just says how Google's Android backup service works, which is wholly unrelated to that first sentence.

If you are talking about device backup, apple had it encrypted before Advanced data protection.

If you are talking about other data, Google don't have it encrypted even today.

> If you are talking about device backup, apple had it encrypted before Advanced data protection.

Not end to end: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-end-to-end-encryption-iclo...

Parent talks about device backup. Your link talks about iCloud backup. Different things

Devices are backed up to iCloud. Same thing.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/view-and-manage-backu...

Users have defence against snooping, it's not using Google in the first place if this is a consideration in their threat model.

Does or should grandma care? No.

Should a political dissenter living in an oppressive regime think twice? Yes.

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