Comment by modeless
17 hours ago
It means, for example, Google Messages uses E2EE backups. Google cannot read your E2EE messages by default, period. Not from your own backup, not from other peoples' backups. No backup loophole. Most other E2EE messaging apps also do not have a backup loophole like iMessage.
It's not hard to understand why Apple uploading every message to themselves to read by default is different from somebody intentionally taking a screenshot of their own phone.
>Google cannot read your E2EE messages by default, period.
Is icloud backups opt in or opt out? If it's opt in then would your objection still hold?
I'm less concerned with whether it is technically opt in or opt out and more concerned with whether it is commonly enabled in practice.
What would resolve my objection is if Apple either made messages backups E2EE always, as Google did and as Apple does themselves for other data categories like Keychain passwords, or if they excluded E2EE conversations (e.g. from ADP people) from non-E2EE backups, as Telegram does. Anything short of that does not qualify as E2EE regardless of the defaults, and marketing it as E2EE is false advertising.