Comment by cromka
9 hours ago
Sure, but these are all mere statements. You don't know if they fully back that until there's a public standoff with law enforcement/administration and there weren't any in recent years. Yet at the same time it's hard to believe there were no attempts from that government to decrypt some devices they needed. So the fact we hear nothing about it is also an information to me. Sure, this is all speculation, but all things considered...
Besides, they fully comply with Chinese requirements, so...
PS. Others report Filevault keys are also being backed to iCloud since September and they didn't tell anyone: https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/09/filevault-on-macos-tahoe-...
iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted, even without the Advanced Data Protection setting. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 Not something they can turn over to the feds.
And if you don't want iCloud Keychain, you are still given the choice to encrypt and print the backup key.
They fully comply with Chinese requirements if you subscribe to iCloud in China, and they do this quite transparently. They do not, notably, say they don't share anything with China and then go ahead and do it anyway.
Unless Apple is straight up lying about their technology and encryption methods used to secure iCloud and their hardware, the issue of a public standoff is moot, because Apple couldn't help them if they wanted to. And while perhaps it's possible that Apple would lie to consumers to please US law enforcement, it's a bit of a stretch to say that because there haven't been any high-profile cases where law enforcement tries to force Apple to give up what they don't have, that this must be evidence that they're in cahoots.
> Unless Apple is straight up lying about their technology and encryption methods
Which, to be clear, is perfectly possible. Apple has denied the existence of a deliberately backdoored system at least once before: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Who knows what else they're hiding, if we only found out about this scheme in 2023.