Private Data On iOS Devices Not So Private After All

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 26, 2014 @02:24AM from the it's-totally-intuitive dept.

theshowmecanuck (703852) writes with this excerpt from Reuters summarizing the upshot of a talk that Jonathan Zdziarski gave at last weekend's HOPE conference: Personal data including text messages, contact lists and photos can be extracted from iPhones through previously unpublicized techniques by Apple Inc employees, the company acknowledged this week. The same techniques to circumvent backup encryption could be used by law enforcement or others with access to the 'trusted' computers to which the devices have been connected, according to the security expert who prompted Apple's admission. Users are not notified that the services are running and cannot disable them, Zdziarski said. There is no way for iPhone users to know what computers have previously been granted trusted status via the backup process or block future connections. If you'd rather watch and listen, Zdziarski has posted a video showing how it's done.

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Stallman was right by jabberw0k · 2014-07-26 02:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

These so-called "smart telephones" aren't telephones at all; they are computers. Computers that you cannot control. And if you aren't, who is?
Some folks thought Richard Stallman was crazy for saying no-one should run software or use hardware that is based on clandestine (proprietary, hidden) knowledge. This latest revelation is just one reason he was right all along.