Apple Confirms Some Encrypted iCloud User Data is Stored on Google Cloud Platform

[BaltimoreMediaBlog]

This is because Cook is a pipeline guy, not a products guy, as Jobs himself stated as a concern.

Jobs picked Cook because he knew he was the best bean counter and there was no way Jobs' product line in the works would bankrupt the company with him managing it. To say Jobs thought he was a product guy or had a vision would be stretching it. Keep in mind, Steve Jobs never really thought he was going to die! He totally believed his crazy homeopathic treatments would cure him better than modern science.

 

[bopajuice]

The fact that it is encrypted does not mean anything, it could just be encrypted with sha1 or something equally insecure, which can be broken in about 5 minutes on modern computers. Or Apple could have given Google the keys so they can make backups. Or Google just might be forwarding everything to the NSA which can break anything.

Hopefully Apple has done their due diligence, but nothing is guaranteed these days. Outsourcing iCloud storage decisions might be made by some junior manager that was told to get more storage at the cheapest cost.

And while it may be stored encrypted, who knows how it is being transferred. There are a lot of ways to make silly mistakes with data. Given that Apple has never had their A team on iCould, it would pay to be cautious, but not overly worried at this point. Google is highly deceitful, and smart and probably has a way to make it pay for them.

I do backups of my phone and iPad to my computer. I don't use iCloud for anything other than bookmarks, calendars, reminders, address book, and find my Mac. Nothing to hide there really. If they want to know my neighbor's phone number so be it, or who I am meeting for lunch, no big deal. No photos, and especially no docs, personal material, or work related projects.

 

[pittmantechno]

umm This is pretty normal behavior for enterprise businesses..
DropBox's cloud servers are on amazon AWS..Google and Microsoft are the other options..makes quite a bit of scense for Apple to choose Google - Google has the largest Mac fleet on the planet -
90+% of it's 50k +fleet are Apple computers - puts them in a preferred customer folder no doubt

 

[neutralguy]

You do realize Google (like Amazon, like Microsoft) store thousands of petabytes of data for companies all over the world, almost none of whom have websites posting fevered updates about where that data is held? Your data is already at Google. and Amazon. and Microsoft. And probably a half-dozen cloud providers you've never even heard of. Your bank uses them. Your grocery store uses them. Your employer probably uses them, whether you know it or not.

[doublepost=1519661625][/doublepost]

My only comment is it's a slippery slope as far as letting Google get their hands on ANYTHING.

Just because Google is holding the data means nothing. Google can't or into other companies data as they don't own it. They just host it. What Google does with their own data from Android, Gmail etc has nothing to do with paying customer data. Apple is a paying customer of Google, not a free customer like us who uses free services. So calm down.

 

[bopajuice]

GOD WHAT NEXT, Intel making processors for the Mac?!?!?!?!? Jobs we miss you-Oh wait...

OMG Toshiba making iPod Hard Drives?!?! Jobs we miss you-Oh wait...

SAMSUNG making iPhone 3G processors?!?!?! Jobs we miss you-Oh wait...

STOP THE PRESSES! Corning is manufacturing the glass for the iPhone screen?!?!?! Jobs we miss you-Oh wait...

Apple doesn't produce their own materials, they manufacture them all together in third party plants. Do you think Apple sends out Jonny Ive to harvest the aluminum for the MacBooks, Eddy Cue is out cutting the glass for iPhone and iPad screens? Apple oversees third party suppliers and manufacturers them in third party plants. They have always done this, even in the 2nd Jobs-era. They aren't Tesla, they don't have a
Gigafactory. Why is this bad, and how would this be different if Jobs was around?

Based on the eco-system stranglehold, you would think they did make all their own stuff.

 

[Calebtt]

Samsung manufacturing screens, iCloud stored in Google Services, camera sensors from Sony... what’s next, Microsoft Stores selling iPhone? Jobs we miss you.

Starting to look like a big conspiracy, what is the real iPhone

 

[imran5720]

SO its only secure for now, in few years when quantum computers can try trillions keys per second, google can easily break this encryption and view user data ?

 

[B60boy]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Also Spotlight and Search is based on Google but the data is not sent to Google till you go to Safari.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/25/appl...m-microsofts-bing-to-google-on-ios-and-macos/

 

[DeepIn2U]

Pretty well for me. She controls all my smart home stuff, even when away from home. She plays Apple Music quite accurately on my Homepod. She listens on my Watch, giving me the weather and activity info. I have no complaints, she's far more natural than Alexa was, and understands me better than the Google Home's I got rid of.

Awesome.

I've still yet to find HomeKit products beyond Philips Hue that works in an Apartment/Condo setup. Like where is the peek-hole camera and LCD? Siri is great ... but here North of the USA border I cannot ask Siri to "Play me the top song in (any year) 1985/1995" because this and a few other commands don't support Canada. Very odd.

Alexa ... I don't want a modernized Robot from The Jetson's just to order me products on the internet on top of Home and Music and Calendar that I already have with Siri.

 

[thettareddast]

"To make an Apple computer from scratch, first you must invent the universe" -Carl Sagan

 

[Scottsoapbox]

Does this mean we'll see Google cloud pricing for Apple cloud services? Because it seems hard to argue for the Apple premium in this case.

 

[imola.zhp]

Probably good to be diversified with data storage.

 

[Uaaerospace2]

Having been part of some of these decisions on cloud data with large companies, I can say that almost always, outside of customer credit card info, the company doing the outsourcing does not care one bit about the security of their customer data. The decision is made on cost, then sometimes availability and reliability, but I've never heard of privacy being considered.

I guess you've never worked at a company that prides itself in customer privacy then. Sad. I can't speak for Apple because I don't work for them (and you probably shouldn't generalize either), but I'm involved in cloud storage decisions at an academic institution and we take privacy very seriously. My point is that the importance of customer data privacy varies widely depending upon the company or place of business.

 

[kingtj]

Seriously, it doesn't work like that. The "Apple premium" for any of their cloud services is paid because they built their whole software "world" around them. OS X integrates tightly with features they designed to store your content via your iCloud login and password, so they're going to charge you whatever asking price they feel that whole thing is worth. Doesn't matter who stores the back end data for them. (We don't even know the terms of the contract they did that under to really know what Apple pays.)

In the big picture, hard drive storage costs have continued to fall as it gets cheaper and cheaper to store each MB of content to one. (SSDs really drove down prices on traditional spinning drives, causing them to keep boosting capacities for the dollar as the continued reason to buy one instead.)

I don't see ANY of the cloud-based storage services continually dropping prices based on those marketplace changes either.

Does this mean we'll see Google cloud pricing for Apple cloud services? Because it seems hard to argue for the Apple premium in this case.

 

[dontpokebearz]

As much as I don't like Google, I don't really care that my data is stored on the drives. As long as they can't see it.

What I really would like to see is iCloud being updated. It's lacking features that others have, and honestly needs a name change. iCloud sounds so cheesy.

 

[CE3]

The most profitable company in the world can’t use their own servers for storing customer data. And we’re supposed to believe privacy is top priority while they pass off our encrypted data to Google. Lol

 

[magicschoolbus]

Bye bye, iCloud.

 

[DaveOP]

The most profitable company in the world can’t use their own servers for storing customer data. And we’re supposed to believe privacy is top priority while they pass off our encrypted data to Google. Lol

More like the most profitable company in the world doesn't need the added distraction of running more and more server farms. Better for them to focus on things they are good at, and rely on Google/Amazon for the things THEY are good at.

 

[joeblow7777]

Samsung manufacturing screens, iCloud stored in Google Services, camera sensors from Sony... what’s next, Microsoft Stores selling iPhone? Jobs we miss you.

What does this have to do with Jobs being gone?

Fanboys have this ridiculous fantasy that all of these companies have some personal vendettas against each other or something. They will always use each other's parts and services when it makes economic sense to do so. It's all just business. Only the fanboys get worked up about crossing enemy lines, so to speak.

 

[manu chao]

Some guys can freely test decryption algorithms.

As can any internet provider, any CDN, or any backbone provider.

 

[I7guy]

Apple you should have a dynamic, fully redundant architecture.

 

[CE3]

More like the most profitable company in the world doesn't need the added distraction of running more and more server farms. Better for them to focus on things they are good at, and rely on Google/Amazon for the things THEY are good at.

Sorry, I thought iCloud supposed to be Aople’s cloud service, not Amazon and Google’s. What a joke.

 

[velocityg4]

When I discovered iCloud was using AWS and such (a curious admin and tcpdump can learn a lot) my first thought was actually why Apple is investing so much into its own data centers if it's just going to use AWS and Google anyway.

That's what I was wondering too. I was mildly surprised when I read about this. All I could think was, "What's with all those fancy giant data centers you keep crowing about?"

My guess is Apple wants to do all of iCloud in house. That they are working towards that goal. It's going to take many years until they can build up the data infrastructure.

There is likely well over 1/2 a billion Apple devices backing up to iCloud. Plus all the Photo Streaming and iCloud Photo Library. With tons of HD video and high res pictures. That's going to take a massive amount of infrastructure. iCloud has only been around for seven years.

 

[jedwards87]

Good advice. I became unfettered from iCloud weeks ago. Now, I get for FREE from Google what I was paying Apple to do.

You do know that it is really not FREE right ? Google is a huge corporation that has to make a profit. They do not do that by giving away stuff for FREE.
[doublepost=1519665858][/doublepost]I am going to continue to trust that Apple is doing the right thing by me. If they say my data is safe (including being safe from snooping by Google) then I have to believe them until it is proven not to be true.

 

[kingtj]

You don't seem to get how things works these days.... There are millions of people building cloud-based services out there, but almost ALL of them involve the same relative few "giants" to store some of their data. Google, Amazon and Microsoft Azure are among the biggest ones.

Apple hasn't kept ALL of its data in-house for a LONG time now. This latest info just tells us they decided to pull away from giving money to Microsoft to help host part of it, and traded that for the Google and Amazon combo instead.

Honestly, Apple's track record with doing anything related to cloud services is pretty poor. When they were first starting and doing it all on their own, you had sluggish performance and constant service outages. (I remember when they first started offering Apple "iDisk" storage in OS X. PAINFULLY slow .. to the point Apple had to hide the fact it was so bad in a subsequent OS X release by locally caching all the data that was still in the process of trickling up to their servers.)

Like others are saying here -- it's just good common sense to use existing infrastructure that's proven and used by everyone else, like Amazon EMC or Google. Anything else is burning through huge sums of money to reinvent the wheel. (And doubly nonsensical if Apple would insist, afterwards, on not letting anyone ELSE pay them under contract to use their data centers ... keeping it ONLY for iCloud.)

Sorry, I thought iCloud supposed to be Aople’s cloud service, not Amazon and Google’s. What a joke.