Of course this is true, but it's such a reductive view of the broader security picture.

If messages are plaintext, they can be leaked by a hacker, accessed by an insider, not wiped from some drives they throw out for recycling... None of these attack vectors require the provider being evil, so removing them already reduces your exposure by a lot.

Secondly, if you're being targeted by hackers that have already gotten into the messaging provider, looking at some rows in a database is waaay easier and safer than somehow sneaking exhilaration code into the next release build of the app.

Finally, if your main adversary are government agents with a warrant, there is a huge legal difference between forcing the company to ship malicious code (possibly to all users) and simply printing out a few rows in a database. IIRC Apple has already won at least once in US court on this exact point.

But it’s all or nothing and has to be applied to the entire account.

I've seen many non-technical end users use Signal, immediately upon trying it, with no problems. I've never seen someone have a problem.

You mean the one that by default is a 4 digit number and therefore trivially brute forcable?

And neither android hardware nor the google servers have any kind of secure element enforcing brute force protections like '3 tries then we wipe the keys'.

Do you consider all security to be a joke then? If you send me a message, how will you actually guarantee that I do not make a copy of it once it's on my own computer?

> With Advanced Data Protection, the number of data categories that use end-to-end encryption rises to 25 and includes your iCloud Backup,...

> iCloud Backup (including device and Messages backup) (3)

> (3) .... Advanced Data Protection: iCloud Backup and everything inside it is end-to-end encrypted, including the Messages in iCloud encryption key.

Does it really? There is no option to use my own hardware/software for backup storage. I mean what would usually go to icloud.

That i would really trust.

So to me the answer is no.

That’s pretty much exactly what all the other vendors in the market provide: insecure and spying by default.

I don’t really understand why Apple should somehow get good points for their stance on privacy when they are actually doing pretty much the same thing than everyone else.

I don't believe this is the case. Apple generally prefers to diminish the importance and risks of specific actions unless they have some monetary advantage. e.g. Apple is happy to warn you (multiple times) that an alternative marketplace is "dangerous" and yet iMessage iCloud Backups are just a click away with a friendly "so your messages are available everywhere".

Another example is Photos - Apple has no problem activating features that collect "anonymized" information from my pictures. Yes, there is an opt-out, but having all that on by default is not in the spirit of a privacy-minded operation.

And about the choice - someone already pointed out in other comments, there really is no way to replace iCloud with anything else for backups and app data sync. So the choice is not really a choice.

Same reason FileVault isn't on by default on macs.

Maybe people think that was all for show but I’m struggling to think of other examples of massive companies saying that so publicly/firmly. See also, all the times the police/FBI/etc have complained or even tried to force Apple to provide a backdoor.

All that said, I guess a, very legitimate, argument could be made that if Apple provided ways to swap out iCloud for whatever service you wanted then there might be an escape hatch of sorts even if iCloud was compromised/limited.

I can't sign into Apple Music on Android because it doesn't support security keys – small price to pay.

"No, not like that." :O) But seriously, you can also just turn off iCloud Backups for Messages. (iCloud > Storage > Messages > Turn Off and Delete from iCloud)

> …otherwise they need to stop falsely advertising iMessage as a strong e2ee system when it literally uploads its encryption keys to Apple by default.

iMessage is E2EE, but iCloud Backup is not, which I understand is a distinction probably not well understood by most HN readers, much less your average consumer.

So the only case that is relatively unusual is having the Mac back up to a local NAS, but that's only because NAS themselves are a power user thing. Still, turnkey ones like Synology etc are much more common than "triple digits worldwide", and if you have a Mac and a NAS, why wouldn't you set up Time Machine to backup to said NAS?

iTunes (or Mac OS's built-in iPhone sync) is the recommended way to do this, although the protocol has been reverse-engineered to hell and back and third-party software exists for it. iMazing is the most notable one, although there are probably others, and you could hack something on top of libimobiledevice if you really wanted to.

Getting those backups from your computer to the NAS is an exercise for the reader.

No, if you do not use “Messages in iCloud” then your iMessage private key does not leave your device.

OMEMO is not always-on like Signal, so it doesn't even compare.