[Nullabillity]

People said the same about Apple, and then it turned out to be bullshit.[0] And, big surprise, their customers did not seem to hold them accountable.

So in the end, paying for stuff just shows that you're a more valuable product to sell. And gives them a great primary key to track you by.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106536

[falcolas]

I've said this to most naysayers, but AWS aims itself at businesses, who are much more forward with their pocketbook and lawyers in protecting their privacy. AWS can't safely market data stored in their systems without running the risk of being abandoned and sued into oblivion.

Even Google doesn't dare monetize data stored in their enterprise customer's databases.

EDIT: Failing to offer a privacy-enhancing feature, and actively compromising and mining your customers data are quite different scenarios.

[alharith]

Google doesn't dare directly monetize data stored in their customer's databases. There's zero doubt in my mind they are piping everything somewhere, completely anonymized, and feeding their models.

[wool_gather]

> their customers did not seem to hold them accountable.

That story is 48 hours old; it remains to be seen what the effects will be.

[nemothekid]

>People said the same about Apple, and then it turned out to be bullshit.

I don't understand this claim at all. It's always been clear that if your paranoid about the state, to turn off iCloud backups. And it's not like Apple is selling your backups either.

[oarsinsync]

This is a tech oriented forum where we’re (as a group) more privacy conscious and more generally aware of how things are stored than the general public.

And yet even here, there is widespread surprise at the news that iCloud backups are not fully encrypted in such a way that keeps them private from Apple.

If we (as a group) have in some factions been caught by surprise, what are the chances that the general public are also not aware?

[nemothekid]

>And yet even here, there is widespread surprise at the news that iCloud backups are not fully encrypted in such a way that keeps them private from Apple.

Anyone who thought Apple kept iCloud backups fully encrypted was being willfully ignorant. Apple has been fully open to the fact that they share iCloud backups with the FBI, this exact same situation happened in the San Bernardino case where Apple provided the backups but the FBI cried about how they wouldn’t unlock the phone.

The tinfoil hat advice has always been to turn off iCloud backups. I don’t buy that anyone privacy conscious should have missed the fact that even Snowden was saying “use an iPhone but turn off iCloud backups” for the last several years.

If you got caught by surprise, then you weren’t paying attention. Apple wasn’t keeping it a secret that they would share your backups with law enforcement. The only reason this is possible is because today they don’t require you to enter a password to restore your iPhone to a new phone. Even the way the technology works today implies that Apple can read your iCloud backups without you knowing.