San Jose, California (dpa) – Apple is calling on users to make broader everyday usage of end-to-end encryption, pointing to research the company commissioned showing a recent rise in data breaches.
«Threats to consumer data stored in the cloud have grown dramatically [in the past year],» Apple says, announcing the independent study showing a rise in attacks on cloud platforms and other services, carried out so hackers can gain access to their customers’ files.
If files stored on the cloud used end-to-end encryption, however, they only people specified by the owner would be able to see them, but not the providers of the web services – or those who hack into them.
End-to-end encryption is therefore the best possible way to protect data in the cloud, says Apple, which itself has begun natively offering this very feature for its iCloud online file storage.
Apple has for years been marketing itself as a data privacy-conscious company, in contrast to Android developer Google, which operates one of the world’s largest advertising platforms relying on data collected on users.
Police in several countries have recently made attempts to undermine end-to-end encryption for investigative purposes.
Apple admits that all-round encryption is difficult to implement for emails, as well as contact and calendar data. This is because the original protocols are not suitable for this without breaking the general compatibility between different services and providers.