“When Silicon Valley closes a door for spies, it opens a window,” Danny Yadron reports for The Guardian. “That’s the conclusion of several former government officials, academics and privacy advocates in a study Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society released on Monday. The report argues that despite talk that encryption from the likes of Apple and [others] obstructs national security, these companies are creating many new technologies that will make surveillance easier. That’s a notable finding because the study’s authors include several law and order types, such as Matthew G Olsen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center for the Obama administration who is now an executive at IronNet Cybersecurity – a startup founded by former National Security Agency director General Keith Alexander.”
“It comes as many US law enforcement officials, including the FBI director, James Comey, have pressed tech companies to make sure they can access user communications even if they are encrypted as they travel the internet,” Yadron reports. “There are several reasons things may not be as bad as they seem for investigators. For one, encryption, which relies on complex math, is very hard to implement correctly. More importantly for technology companies, it can get in the way of their ability to mine user content to better target advertisements. Moreover, consumers can adopt encrypted messaging apps, but they work on phones and computers that run other less secure software. This can often give prying eyes an opening, the report says.”
“As tech companies focus their attention on making more consumer products ‘smart’ by connecting them to the internet, they increasingly open up new surveillance windows, the report concludes,” Yadron reports. “For instance, what good is an encrypted phone call if government investigators can listen in on the call through a microphone in a “smart TV” in the same room?
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Wonderful. Your iPhone will be secure, but your refrigerator won’t.
All the more reason to use Apple products and services over Google, if you value your privacy at all, as Google is nearly wholly dependent on mining user content to better target advertisements.
A message from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy:
At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled.
Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services like Apple Pay. And we continue to make improvements. Two-step verification, which we encourage all our customers to use, in addition to protecting your Apple ID account information, now also protects all of the data you store and keep up to date with iCloud.
We believe in telling you up front exactly what’s going to happen to your personal information and asking for your permission before you share it with us. And if you change your mind later, we make it easy to stop sharing with us. Every Apple product is designed around those principles. When we do ask to use your data, it’s to provide you with a better user experience.
We’re publishing this website to explain how we handle your personal information, what we do and don’t collect, and why. We’re going to make sure you get updates here about privacy at Apple at least once a year and whenever there are significant changes to our policies.
A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.
Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.
One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether.
Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.
Our commitment to protecting your privacy comes from a deep respect for our customers. We know that your trust doesn’t come easy. That’s why we have and always will work as hard as we can to earn and keep it.
Tim
Visit the Apple-backed reformgovernmentsurveillance.com today.
SEE ALSO:
Apple CEO Tim Cook defends privacy, encryption amidst terrorist concerns – December 18, 2015
Apple CEO Cook defends encryption, opposes back door for government spies – October 20, 2015
Judge declines to order Apple to disable security on device seized by U.S. government – October 10, 2015
Apple refused to give iMessages to the U.S. government – September 8, 2015
Obama administration war against Apple just got uglier – July 31, 2015
Edward Snowden: Apple is a privacy pioneer – June 5, 2015
U.S. Senate blocks measures to extend so-called Patriot Act; NSA’s bulk collection of phone records in jeopardy – May 23, 2015
Rand Paul commandeers U.S. Senate to protest so-called Patriot Act, government intrusion on Americans’ privacy – May 20, 2015
Apple, others urge Obama to reject any proposal for smartphone backdoors – May 19, 2015
U.S. appeals court rules NSA bulk collection of phone data illegal – May 7, 2015
In open letter to Obama, Apple, Google, others urge Patriot Act not be renewed – March 26, 2015
Apple’s iOS encryption has ‘petrified’ the U.S. administration, governments around the world – March 19, 2015
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Sparkles” for the heads up.]