Apple does not allow your iOS iCloud data to be encrypted in a manner where Apple cannot access it. As is alluded to in this article. Privacy advocates and privacy caring IT specialists have repeatedly asked Apple to offer such an option, but so far Apple has decided that regular people would turn such an option on, forget their password, then ask Apple for help and would be unhappy with their brand experience if App…
Answers to likely responses: "just use a different cloud service": on iOS, for cloud backups, there are no alternatives: it's iCloud or nothing. Moreover, in the case of Apple this could actually be productive. They have been pushing the privacy angle. Let's not forget that this is the company that pushed out end-to-end encrypted chats to tens (hundreds?) of millions of users before Whatsapp did it. If Apple offered…
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the threat here, but it seems to me that this is not going to be fixed by simply encrypting iCloud. Sure, that would be part of a comprehensive response, but the main problem seems to be that these people had access to internal Apple databases. To my mind, "internal" means everything from retail POS data to iTunes. I guess I'm trying to understand why encrypting iCloud would prevent a ring of internal Apple employees from gathering a person's information and selling it?
And, to be frank, it's concerning because it's not just Apple. What stops a group of internal employees of any company from gathering a person's information and selling it?
What are needed are strong guarantees about data security internal to these companies. My background is in health care technology, so the analogy I would make is HIPAA. But we need HIPAA for everything instead of just for healthcare information. Right now if employees of enterprises outside healthcare access a person's information and they don't sell it, they're just checking on a friend, there is no liability for that. Under HIPAA you're fired at a minimum. That's what we need.