[vineyardmike]

They won't do this. Its their run-around to giving law enforcement access to the devices.

They can claim that the device is secure and always encrypted, and all the messaging is encrypted, and they don't collect user data. This is all true (i assume, but did not audit).

If you care about security, all you have to do is turn off iCloud backup, and everything is secure. If you don't care, well then you have a great feature.

They upload plain-text versions of messages, etc to iCloud so if law enforcement asks, they can still comply with the juicy data. They don't need to back-door the iphone for the Gov. which was a major PR issue a few years ago.

[sneak]

> If you care about security, all you have to do is turn off iCloud backup, and everything is secure.

No, each conversation has at least two endpoints, and it's unlikely that the people you iMessage with have disabled iCloud Backup.

It's sort of like switching from gmail to avoid Google having access to your correspondence: they'll get it from the mailbox of the people still using gmail (so, everyone) that you correspond with.

[vineyardmike]

Ok yeah, i should have been way more clear here. I just meant that your data can't be snooped from the cloud, due to encryption, if backup is turned off.

Of course, this also assumes you trust apple and the implementations of encryption, blah blah blah typical security-depends-on-trust-someone-somewhere warnings.

[unsignedchar]

Very good point. In addition to iCloud Backup for messages, people could also have Messages in iCloud turned on as well

[pseudalopex]

Messages in iCloud is end to end encrypted.