ID: IRCNE2014092324
Date: 2014-09-20
According to “ZDNet”, if the feds are after your iPhone or iPad, it probably won't be Apple's door they'll be knocking on.
After the PRISM scandal broke, the news threw Apple and other Silicon Valley under the bus over allegations that they knowingly participated in a secret surveillance program.
But that wasn't the case at all, as the recently released Yahoo documents showed. Yahoo was threatened with bankruptcy if it didn't comply with the U.S. government's data demands, for the first time solidifying the rebuttals from the named nine technology companies that they were not complicit in state surveillance.
Now, Apple is going one step further — adjusting its encryption and security practices, and its privacy policy, in order to prevent law enforcement from cracking open its smartphone and tablet line-up.
Apple's new mobile operating system, iOS 8, which was released on Wednesday, lands with reworked encryption, forcing law enforcement, federal agents, and intelligence agencies to go to the device owner themselves rather than Apple.
The new encryption methods prevent even Apple from accessing even the relatively small amount of data it holds on users.
"Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data," the company said in its new privacy policy, updated Wednesday. "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."
There are some caveats, however. For the iCloud data it stores, Apple still has the ability (and the legal responsibility) to turn over data it stores on its own servers, or third-party servers it uses to support the service.
iCloud data can include photos, emails, music, documents, and contacts.
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