&gt;The reason iCloud data will always be accessible by Apple, and thus governments, is [...] so that Apple can offer customers the very important feature of accessing their own data if they forget or otherwise don&#x27;t have the password. That is an essential feature, and why this aspect will never change.<p>And may the era of homomorphic encryption schemes come and thus render moot the need for Apple and other companies to access unencrypted data as a plausible excuse when performing back-end processing&#x2F;recovery on their client&#x27;s data.<p>edit: well, to correct myself, as you said that wouldn&#x27;t obviate the need for the feature of &quot;recover data without password, after passing some other security tests&quot;