Implactions of Apple's iOS 8

With the bloom of many mobile technologies, our interactions with technologies have grown instantaneous due to smartphones and/or tablets. With 24/7 access to Internet and other apps available on smartphones and/or tablets, concerns for privacy have also raised. Privacy has become such a huge issue that everyone is aware of the privacy violations by the government, third party, etc. However, the society has been divided into two sides in my opinion w.r.t privacy. First are people who are aware of these issues, but can’t or don’t understand what to do about it. Second would be the tech savvy guys who are constantly battling these privacy fights in coming up with round about ways of protecting it. In this blog, I will be talking about the latter.

“With great power comes great responsibility” indeed applies here for Apple and specifically its iOS 8 operating system (OS). Apple has now officially released its new OS which offers many great features. The one I am particularly interested in is about the means of allowing their users total control over their privacy via full encryption of the devices running iOS 8. If a user has a pass-code to unlock their phones or tablets, then Apple no longer is technologically capable of bypassing or knowing those pass-codes. Without going too much into technicality of encryption, Apple throws away those encrypted keys of the users with pass-codes making them and others technologically incapable of breaking users’ pass-codes. This has created huge fuzz in the media. Security minded guys are very happy with the recent change whereas law enforcement is unhappy. Privacy protection has been reclaimed by Apple. Due this recent change, Apple won’t be able to comply with law enforcement even with a warrant as Apple is technologically infeasible of doing so. That means that law enforcement agencies won’t be able to acquire pass-codes to gain access to Apple’s local products like iTunes, iCloud, etc. Remember though, this only applies to Apple’s products and not to any third party apps on the smartphones or tablets. Also, Apple if presented a warrant for a user is obliged to handover any information they might have due to other means of storage such as cloud, etc.

Apple isn’t the only one to provide such privacy protection; Google’s Android devices already have the capability of doing so. The user manually has to do it rather than it coming as a default. Google though is also looking at making encryption default. If they enroll their new OS with default encryption, what will that imply? What are companies like Apple and Google trying to accomplish? If their true motive is to provide privacy for their users, will they be successful in doing so? Providing default features for encrypting phone’s and/or tablets local data would certainly make that possible if used correctly. What implications would that bring? If good guys’ privacy is protected so is bad guys’. How is government going to treat this issue? What new laws, policies would come out in light of recent developments? Only when questions like these are answered, we would be able to convince ourselves. Till then, we must await for the change.