For years, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has taken pride in the argument that the data that you store on your iPhone is so secure that even the company itself cannot access it. Some time back, Tim Cook, the CEO of the company, said that even if the government were to bomb Apple as a means of forcing them to give out the information that is contained in the iPhones, this would not yield results since even Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) could not access the data, even if it wanted to.
What Steve Cook was describing is a type of encryption called end-to-end encryption that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) uses on all its devices. The essence of this type of encryption is that all the information that is exchanged by individuals using Apple devices cannot be accessed by a third party.
The information remains only accessible to the people who are sharing it and those ones it is meant for. Any other party, including Apple, cannot access the information because it is encrypted and can only be decrypted when it gets to its intended user.
Apple has used this arrangement to preach about its excellence when it comes to matters of the privacy of the users of its devices. It has also used this arrangement to tell off government departments that have been trying to force companies such as Apple and Google to make sure that they can actually read the data that users of their devices share and provide the information to government departments whenever a genuine need arises.
But it has now emerged that Apple can actually get all the information that you have in your iPhone if it ever wanted to. According to Motherboard, it has now emerged that Apple has good access to all the data on its devices which is backed up its iCloud services.
Apparently, Apple decided not to extend its end-to-end encryption services to users who decide to back up their data using the iCloud. What this means is that as much as individuals who back up their data on iCloud have their own passwords and other security codes, Apple still has a master password that it keeps for all the accounts that are backed up on the iCloud. This means that if ever the company decides to read what it is stored there, it will not be a hard thing to do.
According to Asymco, a software consulting company, the ever-growing number of people who are asked to back up their data on iCloud makes the situation more serious. What this means is that many users are foregoing the completely secure local backup method that makes use of the iTunes and guarantees access to end-to-end encryption for the vulnerable iCloud backing up service.
