I’m glad that they’re rolling this out. Privacy advocates have been clamoring for it for quite some time. The additional announcement that they’re abandoning CSAM scanning is another win for privacy advocates.
The Advanced Data Protection for iCloud is a significant announcement. I think making it opt in is important since it has significant implications. Encrypted is important for data that you would rather lose than to have stolen. However, for many users, it would be catastrophic if they were to lose access to their data and will decide not to turn it on.
Agreed. One potential security caveat that comes to mind regarding iMessage is that there is no way to know whether the recipients you’re talking to have Advanced Data Protection enabled.
Don’t you have to swap the public key in person, over Facetime or some other channel, in order to ensure that both sides are fully trusted. This is similar to the way Threema works, BTW.
Yeah. I’m referring to the eventual backups made on the other end. This doesn’t apply if the recipient has disabled backups entirely or has Advanced Data Protection enabled.