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americon t1_iydkd26 wrote

Reply to comment by iCANNcu in Alexa, is the voice-assistant industry doomed? by WestEst101

Maybe I’m naive but I sort of trust Apple. They wouldn’t give up the San Bernardino Shooter’s information to the FBI so would they really give up my information?

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iCANNcu t1_iydlu2w wrote

I think it's naive. Apple is not a person with a personality, it's a corporation that has just 1 goal, to make as much money as possible for it's shareholders. Just look at how they cooperate with the Chinese government to see how their values on privacy really are. Right now their (false) image of being respectful of your data is making them money in the US and that's what matters to Apple, it's not because of their 'values and principles' as a company.

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SeVenMadRaBBits t1_iydqau4 wrote

To add to this.

Companies are run by individuals that switch out. The companies goal is always to increase profits so the switch is usually to someone who will make them more money and many times the person willing to take things further than the previous person which is how we got to where we are with many greedy/ shady companies.

Just because you could trust it once doesn't mean you still can.

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Dje4321 t1_iyduqbj wrote

They absolutely gave up the shooters information though. They handed over their icloud backups without hesitation which depending on your phone settings, could be your entire phone and everything on it. Your contacts, your messages, installed apps, photos, etc. Most people want their phone to be exactly the same when they restore from a backup, so you have to keep a copy of all of it if you want to restore it.

The FBI wanted access to the phone via a backdoor. Apple had no way of doing it as they didnt know the shooters password. So the FBI sued them to try and force them to add a backdoor to their software so they could try and bypass it. Apple refused because

  1. it would eliminate any trust people had with them. Most people wouldnt buy an apple product if the government can just goto them and demand they change their software. Apple and the FBI can say they only added the backdoor once, but with a closed source eco system as tight as IOS, you have no real way to audit or verify anything that happens. the FBI could demand every text message that gets sent is emailed to them and you would have no real way to knowing without a massive amount of work to deconstruct IOS at all levels to verify.

  2. because even if they did create a backdoor to let them bypass the password, most of the data would still be encrypted with the devices password (if apple set it up todo that, pretty stupid if they didnt)

There was nothing stopping the FBI, from simply cloning the devices storage, and simply guessing the shooters passcode which if it was a pin, would take a week at the absolute longest but more than likely, it could burn through all the combinations if a matter of minutes.

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queequagg t1_iydzm2n wrote

>They handed over their icloud backups without hesitation

Of course they did, the FBI had a warrant. They follow the law. It is the user’s choice whether to use a cloud backup, however. You can use encrypted local backups if you prefer.

>because even if they did create a backdoor to let them bypass the password, most of the data would still be encrypted with the devices password

The back door the fbi wanted was a way to inject and run cracking software on the device. Most people’s passcodes are 4-6 digits. That’s trivial to crack, except that the OS (and in more recent phones, the Secure Enclave hardware) limits the rate of decryption attempts. IIRC the FBI found an Israeli company that used security flaws to do exactly that.

>There was nothing stopping the FBI, from simply cloning the devices storage, and simply guessing the shooters passcode which if it was a pin

The pin is entangled with a hardware encryption key physically built into the cpu. Cracking the encryption off the device is practically impossible.

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garry4321 t1_iyeed8d wrote

That was a super publicized forum where Apple was basically given a golden opportunity to publicize that they werent going to share data. The risk with the FBI/law enforcement was nothing compared to the publicity and "trust" they could milk out of the situation.

If you think they are going to put one ounce of their ass on the line to protect you or not secretly use your data for their own goals, you are mistaken

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JL151 t1_iyeyxdt wrote

I always felt like that was more of a publicity stunt to garner more "trust". Like other post said, they can't make money from giving it to the fbi... So let's fight them and show the people we can be trusted... Google has admitted that data mining and sharing is their most lucrative income. Apple just wasn't ready to come out of the closet yet. And with as many of the security breaches ALL these companies have had, its already out that none of their collected data is as "safe and secure" as they all claim.

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