Private Cloud Compute Security Guide

Sibling comments point out (and I believe, corrections are welcome) that all that theater is still no protection against Apple themselves, should they want to subvert the system in an organized way. They’re still fully in control. There is, for example, as far as I understand it, still plenty of attack surface for them to run different software than they say they do.

What they are doing by this is of course to make any kind of subversion a hell of a lot harder and I welcome that. It serves as a strong signal that they want to protect my data and I welcome that. To me this definitely makes them the most trusted AI vendor at the moment by far.

As soon as you start going down the rabbit hole of state sponsored supply chain alteration, you might as well just stop the conversation. There's literally NOTHING you can do to stop that specific attack vector.

History has shown, at least to date, Apple has been a good steward. They're as good a vendor to trust as anyone. Given a huge portion of their brand has been built on "we don't spy on you" - the second they do they lose all credibility, so they have a financial incentive to keep protecting your data.

Apple have name/address/credit-card/IMEI/IMSI tuples stored for every single Apple device. iMessage and FaceTime leak numbers, so they know who you talk to. They have real-time location data. They get constant pings when you do anything on your device. Their applications bypass firewalls and VPNs. If you don't opt out, they have full unencrypted device backups, chat logs, photos and files. They made a big fuss about protecting you from Facebook and Google, then built their own targeted ad network. Opting out of all tracking doesn't really do that. And even if you trust them despite all of this, they've repeatedly failed to protect users even from external threats. The endless parade of iMessage zero-click exploits was ridiculous and preventable, CKV only shipped this year and isn't even on by default, and so on.

Apple have never been punished by the market for any of these things. The idea that they will "lose credibility" if they livestream your AI interactions to the NSA is ridiculous.

> If you don't opt out, they have full unencrypted device backups, chat logs, photos and files.

Also full disk encryption is opt-in for macOS. But the answer isn't that Apple wants you to be insecure, they just probably want to make it easier for their users to recover data if they forget a login password or backup password they set years ago.

> real-time location data

Locations are end to end encrypted.

> Also full disk encryption is opt-in for macOS. But the answer isn't that Apple wants you to be insecure, they just probably want to make it easier for their users to recover data if they forget a login password or backup password they set years ago.

"If you have a Mac with Apple silicon or an Apple T2 Security Chip, your data is encrypted automatically."

The non-removable storage is I believe encrypted using a key specific to the Secure Enclave which cleared on factory reset. APFS does allow for other levels of protection though (such as protecting a significant portion of the system with a key derived from initial password/passcode, which is only enabled while the screen is unlocked).