Slashdot Mirror
Apple Logs Your iMessage Contacts - And May Share Them With Police: The Intercept
The Intercept is reporting that despite what Apple claims, it does keep a log of people you are receiving messages from and shares this and other potentially sensitive metadata with law enforcement when compelled by court order. Apple insists that iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. From the report:This log also includes the date and time when you entered a number, along with your IP address -- which could, contrary to a 2013 Apple claim that "we do not store data related to customers' location," identify a customer's location. Apple is compelled to turn over such information via court orders for systems known as "pen registers" or "tap and trace devices," orders that are not particularly onerous to obtain, requiring only that government lawyers represent they are "likely" to obtain information whose "use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." Apple confirmed to The Intercept that it only retains these logs for a period of 30 days, though court orders of this kind can typically be extended in additional 30-day periods, meaning a series of monthlong log snapshots from Apple could be strung together by police to create a longer list of whose numbers someone has been entering.
Even the turn-on dialog for Siri on the Mac says it will go through your Contacts list so Siri can 'know more about you'. Not good.
Would you rather it didn't warn you? The fact is, Siri is OFF by default on macOS; so if you are that privacy-conscious, you don't HAVE to "Opt-IN".
Sheesh! You'd have a point if Siri was ON by default and/or it didn't warn you BEFORE it scanned your Contacts.
Oh, and you don't HAVE to use MacOS' Contacts list. I NEVER have. The ONLY Contact I have EVER had in my macOS Contacts/Address Book for the past 16 years is my own.
In the case of Siri on the Mac, however, the information is kept on-device, as I recall. In contrast, the situation discussed in the summary involved information that was never being kept strictly on-device and that Apple never claimed was private information that they weren't capable of accessing (which makes the "despite what Apple claims" seem a bit odd). Anyone who had ever glanced through Apple's (quite easily readable) white papers on their security measures would know that they had never made those claims.
According to Apple, iMessage conversation follows roughly this pattern (it's been at least six months since I brushed up on the specifics, so I'll definitely be glossing over quite a few details):
0) At some point in the past, Alice and Bob established Apple IDs, turned on iMessage, provided one or more pieces of contact info by which they could be identified by others via iMessage (e.g. e-mail, phone number), and then linked devices to those Apple IDs. During the process that links a device to an Apple ID, the device generated a fresh private-public key pair and provided the public key to Apple.
1) Alice creates an iMessage intended for Bob and presses send.
2) Alice's device opens an encrypted connection to Apple and indicates to Apple that it wishes to send an iMessage to the Apple ID associated with a provided piece of Bob's contact info.
3) Apple looks up the Apple ID associated with that contact info and returns the set of public keys associated with Bob's Apple ID, one per active device he owns.
4) Alice's device encrypts the iMessage once for each of Bob's devices (using the keys from step 3 so that only Bob's devices can decrypt them), then sends them to Apple. Metadata is included to help Apple route the correct messages to the correct devices.
5) Apple receives the encrypted iMessages and pushes them down to each of Bob's devices.
6) Apple keeps a log of recent messages so that they are able to perform various operations, such as syncing the Read status between Bob's devices after he reads the iMessage on one of them.
All of which is to say, Apple never claimed that they didn't know who you were talking with and when it was happening. Rather, they claimed the exact opposite, since that information is necessary for the operation of iMessage. The fact that they keep a log of information that was always available to them is both unsurprising and something that they had already disclosed. What they actually claimed was that your communication with that other person was end-to-end encrypted such that they couldn't get access to the content of the messages, and that remains true, so far as we know.