Apple’s significant actions to introduce additional data protection features for iMessage and enable consumers to encrypt more of their data in iCloud, it is clear that security will be a top concern for the company in the upcoming year.
Eliminating surveillance
Although the Biden administration’s decision to put the mercenary hackers at NSO Group on a denylist was a positive step, the “surveillance-as-a-service” industry has not been put on hold. Instead, it has atomized it, resulting in a more significant number of businesses than ever before selling similar “services.”
The risk is that the assaults utilized by these services are spreading and evolving, just like any other technology. And as more organizations provide them, the cost of launching these state-level monitoring strikes will decrease. This was always going to happen.
This week, Apple unveiled three potent new data security tools: Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, Security Keys for Apple ID, and iMessage Contact Key Verification. The goal is to defend users from such assaults.
Although most privacy activists applauded the decision, certain countries and the FBI are horrified, fearing that greater technologically driven privacy will complicate their work.
That may be the case, but the cost of not having these safeguards in place is undoubtedly considerably higher – after all if governments could be trusted with this kind of surveillance technology, it wouldn’t be spreading so quickly. It will also be exceedingly challenging to decant that specific genie after it has escaped the figurative bottle. The government in the UK has already said that 40% of firms were attacked last year.
