Can Apple read your iMessages?
Why is everyone so critical? I'm far from an Apple fanboy, having opted to never buy one of their products again, but they deserve <i>major</i> props here. They have the constraint of "the system must be easy to use" and, from what I can tell, did pretty much as much as they could to add strong crypto to the mix <i>at no benefit to themselves</i>.<p>Apple could have just gone "fuck it, let's store it in plaintext, since it's never going to be good enough anyway", but adding strong, transparent encryption to one of the most-used messaging services in existence right now is a very good thing, in my book.<p>Sure, the transparency introduces some flaws, but Apple has protected itself by a whole slew of passive attacks, which, to my knowledge, is the kind of attack that the mass surveillance state uses, and what a <i>large</i> messaging service is most at risk of.<p>Getting a warrant and saying "hey, we have a warrant for X, can we look at their communications", and then having Apple MITM that person is much, much more preferable to me than having a government say "we need <i>all</i> your data" and then the provider just handing the data over, since it's all in plaintext.<p>As it stands, Apple has pretty much disabled large-scale surveillance of iMessage accounts, which is what PRISM and all the furore is about, and people <i>still</i> shit on them?<p>Can we have some perspective please? If we lambaste any provider who takes steps to safeguard our privacy (again, at no benefit to them, since most people who use iMessage don't even <i>know what encryption is</i>), then what do you think the next service to have the choice in a product will say? "Hmm, I could either store everything in plaintext and have governments strong-arm me into sharing it with them (which I couldn't really care less about), I could build really strong encryption into it and make it an unusable mess for no added benefit to me, or I could build as much encryption into it as doesn't impact usability, again for no benefit to me, and get shat on for not providing option #2. Gee, how can I ever decide?"<p>If you want strong privacy/security, use Silent Circle (disclosure I work for them etc). If you care about your day-to-day privacy and want to talk to people you know, you could do <i>much</i> worse than iMessage.