this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Why the fuck not?
This comes up every so often. By default they're not fully encrypted because people are bad at managing their accounts and they expect apple to be able to recover their account/backup/data when they forget their password, which happens all the time for non-techy people. I believe the backups are encrypted at rest, but it's encrypted with a key that apple has so they can recover it if needed. The support burden of "no really we can't recover your data bc we encrypted it" when someone is in the process of losing all of their photos/messages/etc isn't worth it. And tbh I kind of agree with this compromise.
You can turn on the option to fully encrypt the cloud backup, and you click through a warning that says apple can't recover the data if you forget your pw. I think this is reasonable bc if you care you can just turn that on.
It's important to note here that even if you turn on this option, Apple does not support full end-to-end encryption, there are still multiple factors that they keep under standard data protection which means they still have the encryption keys. They keep this under the guise of deduplication so they can save on storage costs but some examples of this are:
They explain how everything with their encryption works here