Published in News

Apple’s “stands up to Government” is just more spin

by on19 September 2014

Court orders make anything possible

The Fruity Cargo cult Apple appears to be making a stand against the government. Faced with the recent leak of nude celebrity photos, which was an iCloud hack, Tim Cook said it had strengthened its iCloud security with two-factor authentication and updated Privacy Policy on an entirely new section of its website.

Cook claims Apple has "never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services." "We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will," "We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will," he wrote.

This sounds good particularly when you consider that when Apple was asked about its participation in NSA's PRISM program back in June 2013, Apple said it does not give any government agency "direct access" to its servers. "Any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”

Now, Cook claims Apple has never allowed access to its servers, direct or not, but fails to mention anything about court orders.

In Apple's new Privacy page, called "Government Information Requests” Apple claims it cannot decrypt a user's phone (if it's protected by a passcode) even if a government requests it.

"On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8," says Apple.

However there is an element of spin involved in this announcement. Apple might not be able to hand over data from your phone to the spooks, but really that is not the problem. With all the data on the cloud, all the spooks have to do is get a court order. Apple can’t talk about it and the user would never know.

Apple insists that "only a small fraction" of requests from law enforcement seek personal data from those accounts and "less than 0.00385% of customers had data disclosed due to government information requests."

Over the years we have come to distrust statements from Apple which talk about “small fractions of users.” Rubberband gate was said to effect a “small number of users” and it turned out to be most of them.

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