Thoughts on iCloud with Advanced Data Protection?

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

Google has end-to-end encryption for some major services, but that’s beside the point I think. I don’t foresee iCloud Advanced Data Protection being worth recommending on Privacy Guides as a standalone tool we point to and say “use this for privacy,” although if you already use iCloud I’d certainly encourage enabling it.

I discussed it further here when it launched:

Apple advances user security with powerful new data protections

Lots of important gotchas here. Don’t get me wrong, this is great, but there are definitely drawbacks to be aware of. The main one being their use of convergent encryption for file deduplication: Some metadata and usage information stored in iCloud remains under standard data protection, even when Advanced Data Protection is enabled. For example, dates and times when a file or object was modified are used to sort your information, and checksums of file and photo data are used to help Apple de-…