iCloud Uploads Local Data Outside of iCloud Drive

Since the continuity feature requires Bluetooth 4, I figured the magic was done over Bluetooth and wifi.

I personally don't mind using iCloud, but I understand the authors reservations. But feel the root problem is the NSA, not apple. It's too bad that America has lost control of its government and is unable to fix this.

Interesting, but:

There are two kinds of users in this scenario. Those who don't care (99%) and those who do.

If you count yourself among the latter group, as I do, then it's always solid advice to choose actions which clarify your intentions.

In this case:

  - don't use iCloud
  - don't use iCloud sync for the app you use for private data
  - do explicitly choose to save the file locally
  - don't enable new features like Continuity that clearly change the file
    persistence and availability model without considering your old patterns

The author is rightly sore that his bits got pushed to Apple due to his oversight. He's wrong to place the blame fully on Apple, but it's hard to be fair when you're angry. And I'm glad he wrote it up because it should encourage people to think carefully about where and to whom they trust their data. Though most people I know sync their private data to Dropbox, Ffs, so...thinking != thinking, I guess.

My secure notes strategy is vim with encrypted files on an encrypted partition. It could still leak, and I'd be angry, but there are at least three vendors involved that would have to alter their products behaviours before I was hugely surprised. TextEdit on HFS+ on OSX with iCloud enabled is just one vendor, who can't always cater to my 1% of 1% expectations.

I'm not angry, but it does violate the principle of least surprise and the document model that's been in use for text editors forever.

I opted in to iCloud Drive to synchronize files - files I chose to store in iCloud.

I did not opt in to synchronize my unsaved files in apps not currently supported by Continuity, nor was there any warning or indication that that would occur.

How would you feel if the OS, without warning, started syncing your vim temporary files (including your pre-encrypted versions) to the cloud? This is the same thing. Don't hate because it's TextEdit and iA Writer.

I'm pretty sure that this has been happening at least as early as Mountain Lion. I felt really violated when I discovered it - I use TextEdit as a scratchpad, so it's always full of random notes (and a temporary copy-paste spot for private keys, double-plus-ungood!). Not to mention financial data into Numbers - those were being synced automatically, too.

Another gotcha I noticed around the same time - Notes from iPhone are automatically stored to the primary email account. So I had my private scratchpad phone notes stored on my corp account's Notes folder with no easy and obvious way to re-associate them to the correct account.

It's easy to disable, but as the writer notes, that's not the point - if you don't know it's happening, there's not much you can do, just feel your stomach drop, disable it, then get to work figuring out how much damage was caused (i.e., get to swapping keys, ugh...).

I do not see any proof in the form of ip addresses to the location where this documents are uploaded and that being part of PRISM.

What IP addresses?