Apple’s New Marketing Plan: Screw the Police

What does it say about the
state of Americans’ relationship with their own government that its
largest tech company can use the ability to conceal private
information from authorities as a selling point?

Apple isn’t really focusing on marketing its latest mobile
operating system that way (they’re more about bragging about how they don’t
sell info about your personal habits to advertisers), but they
aren’t shy about pointing out their resistance
to rolling over and accepting government data demands. Observant
tech journalists have noticed something big in their latest privacy
notes. Apple has changed its encryption so that the company itself
cannot access the data on its users’ phones and iPads without the
passcode. Thus, if police or the feds come to Apple with warrants
to grab potentially useful private data off a device, they couldn’t
comply even if they wanted to. Ars Technica
explains:

Previously,
as we reported in May 2014, if law enforcement came to Apple
with a seized device and a valid warrant, it was able to access a
substantial portion of the data already on an iPad or iPhone. But
under the latest version of iOS, even that will be impossible.

“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,” the company wrote on its website Wednesday
evening. “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.”

To be clear, though, this is not perfect protection. The
Washington Post
notes that this won’t protect data stored elsewhere, like on
cloud services. So as certain naked celebrities have recently
learned, if there’s stuff on your phones or iPads you don’t want
other people getting their hands on, maybe don’t send it up to the
cloud.