Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 109 posts

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#31

Post by 4ad »

b1ackb0x wrote: post #21
gruez wrote: post #3

>When Apple Inc begins hosting Chinese users’ iCloud accounts in a new Chinese data center 1. get vpn 2. create US icloud account 3. ??? 4. profit?

it's not so easy without US credit/debit card

You don't need a credit card to create a US Apple account, and you don't need a VPN either. I don't live in China, I live in Europe, but I have a US account because everything is better about Apple US accounts.

You can use it for free (you get 5GB of iCloud space, IIRC), but to be able to pay for services I buy US iTunes gift cards from ebay (mark-up about 1%). I can pay all Apple services with this, including iCloud storage and apps and music and movies.

It's a hassle, but it's totally worth it for me.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#32

Post by abalone »

dogma1138 wrote: post #29
abalone wrote: post #8

To Apple's credit there are still significant parts of their platform that remain end-to-end encrypted even in China -- meaning that Apple or any other cloud operator can't read because they don't have the keys, notably:[1] - iMessage - Keychain - Siri data And more like health, home & payments. While it's unfortunate that Apple couldn't compel China to run their government requests for data through the U.S. court sy…

Aren’t all the passwords backedup in iCloud as well as all your phone backups? It seems that China would just need to do a bit of work but they still can get every piece of data on the device.

Passwords are backed up but they are end to end encrypted. Check out Cloud Key Vault, it’s a pretty cool solution for keychain (password) backups designed for adversarial clouds.

Unfortunately does not apply to regular iCloud backups or most other data. But a major step forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&feature=youtu.be...

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#33

Post by abalone »

madeofpalk wrote: post #20
mtgx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To Apple's non -credit, it's still tying iMessage backups to iCloud backups despite years of criticism over this. That means everyone who uses iCloud backups (enabled by default on iPhones) don't actually benefit from iMessage's "end-to-end encryption" (which isn't that safe against sophisticated hackers or oppressive authorities to begin with). I'd say people may as well forget about Apple's "privacy stance". It's n…

My understanding is that Apple recently enabled end to end encryption for iOS backups using your password?

Just keychain backups. However they could extend that mechanism to other data. I’m excited to see what they do with iMessage-on-iCloud which is very close to release.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#34

Post by tonylinn80 »

Well, I do live in China and I don't see anyone feeling any fear about this... Seriously, you can easily turn off keychain if you don't trust a cloud service to store all your passwords. And if i decide to use such a service, I'd certainly trust a local company much more than Apple or anything of US origin.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#35

Post by abalone »

tonylinn80 wrote: post #34

Well, I do live in China and I don't see anyone feeling any fear about this... Seriously, you can easily turn off keychain if you don't trust a cloud service to store all your passwords. And if i decide to use such a service, I'd certainly trust a local company much more than Apple or anything of US origin.

To be clear, keychain is end to end encrypted including the Cloud Key Vault that backs it up to potentially adversarial clouds. Not true for other iCloud data but your passwords are probably safe.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#36

Post by abalone »

techrede wrote: post #9
tcd wrote: post #2

So don't store data in iCloud? It's perfectly possible to perform your own encryption and hold the private key yourself.

Sure, many users in China can use other services, but it seems to be a no win situation for most people. Unless you’re technically sophisticated, you’re unlikely to pursue alternatives which provide a greater degree of security and require a bit of technical know how. At best you can say that Chinese users will likely be no worse off using iCloud than they would using any other China-based service. Unfortunately that…

> At best you can say that Chinese users will likely be no worse off using iCloud

You can say better than that. iCloud is more secure than your average service (especially in China). It end to end encrypts the most sensitive data (keychain) for example, and iMessage has managed to stay alive so far.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#37

Post by tonylinn80 »

abalone wrote: post #35
tonylinn80 wrote: post #34

Well, I do live in China and I don't see anyone feeling any fear about this... Seriously, you can easily turn off keychain if you don't trust a cloud service to store all your passwords. And if i decide to use such a service, I'd certainly trust a local company much more than Apple or anything of US origin.

To be clear, keychain is end to end encrypted including the Cloud Key Vault that backs it up to potentially adversarial clouds. Not true for other iCloud data but your passwords are probably safe.

Yeah, other iCloud services are just widely unpopular in China, they're basically irrelevant.

Need to store photos? Baidu disk and tons of other services provide much larger space with no cost, and much more affordable paid version. Wallet? almost everyone in China uses Wechat pay or Alipay now. Even App Store supports Alipay for purchasing apps. Maybe they can steal my contacts? If so, they would have all my Wechat and QQ contacts already, maybe even all the messages. While I do like more privacy, but it's basically at the bottom of my list of concerns.

People mention "Chinese activists", well, almost all of them don't even live in China. Rest assured their lives are not impacted as well

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#38

Post by saagarjha »

pmlnr wrote: post #11
techrede wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, many users in China can use other services, but it seems to be a no win situation for most people. Unless you’re technically sophisticated, you’re unlikely to pursue alternatives which provide a greater degree of security and require a bit of technical know how. At best you can say that Chinese users will likely be no worse off using iCloud than they would using any other China-based service. Unfortunately that…

> Unless you’re technically sophisticated, you’re unlikely to pursue alternatives which provide a greater degree of security and require a bit of technical know how. I'm completely pro-privacy, but I need to ask: why would ordinary people's ordinary data need better security? Even if iCloud might be decrypted by the government. If it's data like bills, government issued photos of ID cards, family photos, it will most…

Almost everyone does something that can be construed as being illegal. By allowing unfettered access to private information, this makes it much easier for laws to be selectively enforced in ways that benefit the government.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#40

Post by tonylinn80 »

echevil wrote: post #25

Speaking as a Chinese citizen, I'd say most people already use local apps/services for almost everything, so having Apple moving servers to China won't practically have any impact on "privacy" or "human rights concerns", at least to vast majority of the population. I really appreciate that Apple is finally moving their servers to China as downloading apps and updates from App Store has been painfully slow. iPhone has…

Totally agree! I would have already switched if I hadn't bought so many iOS apps.
Post reply on HN