I’m sure some of these folks on this thread will also be shocked when they hear Amazon, Google and Microsoft also use third party data centers.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Reportedly Storing Over 8 Million Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
It seems to me you're not aware of a few things:
1. We as consumers pay a lot more per GB than companies do.
2. No taxes.
3. Prices per GB are lower than you think.
Just an example, I just searched the net for a cheap HD, It's as low as $15 for a 320 GB HD and that was a quick search.
Leave Jesus out of this, he knows all of Apple's dirtiest secrets.
Privacy != secrecy.
Privacy can be made just by following policy.
In this case, it is even better. Just because you are a storage provider for someone doesn't mean you can read the data from your customers in any meaningful way.
Apple has always lied about caring about privacy. It's so disingenuous and nothing more than marketing.
It probably has to do with costs. Google is loosing money on their cloud infrastructure and are probably much cheaper than Amazon.
Speaking of the cloud, if people want to store personal information and files in the cloud, they should encrypt the information (using Cryptomator) before sending it to the cloud, so that no one has access to the files (whether it's Apple, Google, Dropbox or OneDrive etc.). That way, if the cloud were to ever be compromised, the personal information is not at risk.
It's not needed if a third party can do it better and/or cheaper.
Apple is famous for doing very little themselves and rely on third party for most of their operations and production.
And yet Apple can encrypt it with its own keys before sending them to Google and thus hiding the content from Google.
You are thinking about storing emails encrypted with keys only known to end-users.
I am actually VERY conservative with my photo storage. Seriously. I will import, in the case of last week, 80 gigabytes of photos off my camera into Lightroom, I throw out 2900 of the 3100 images, I do all edits in there, then export them as 100% size JPEGs and import those into iCloud Photos or Photos for Mac. So I throw away about 90% of what I shoot and once every quarter, I export all 4K Video from photos for Mac and put them all on my Synology downstairs. So iCloud Photos is only iPhone + Real Camera photos since 1999 (when I got my first digital camera) and only the 'best' nothing in there is crap, or multiple pictures of the same scene. it's all my best photos and I have about 120,000 images in there.
My Synology's Video folder is about 8 terabytes with videos going back to the iPhone 3G days and my YouTube Folder which are exported final H.264 versions of the videos I upload to YouTube is about 20 terabytes. I don't keep original videos from my GoPro, Drone or other video cameras or else I'd be the one using 8 million terabytes of Google's Cloud.
My Flickr @ 30,000 images - https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamjackson/
and my Youtube @ 1350 videos https://www.youtube.com/user/adamjackson1984
this represents a sub-set of the content I've created over time....and I don't even make money doing it
So honestly iCloud Storage for me is my house burns down final JPEG version of my last 20 years + all of my personal documents. Work gives me 5 terabytes of OneDrive (well I have 3 jobs so I have 3 one drive folders) and those are all full of Microsoft documents so not really using that storage to its fullest. Then I have my 80 terabyte Synology NAS in the basement with about 60 TB on it and it's the first thing I grab in a fire even though I can replace most of it except my personal videos and then iCloud is like that final doc. Family above is just my GF's iCloud storage & photos.
So the only thing NOT backed up twice or off-site are videos shot on iPhone that were in iCloud Photos and exported to the Synology. If I kept every video I shot...well I can't afford to store it anywhere off-site.
does Apple itself have the keys to decrypt user data stored on Apple's own servers???(servers located on U.S. soil that are 100% built, owned and operated by only long-term full-time Apple employees)
just wondering....
Still, the data probably ends up in a very low cost subsidize Chinese data centre. For all to see. Encryption is not 100% proof you know. You can't say it's secure if you do not operate the data centre, that's my belief.
It is encrypted when stored I believe, though one cannot be sure of transit encyption when sending mail. In addition, Apple holds the keys since its not end-to-end so they can read your emails, although they can’t really do it without a warrant.
I don’t think it would end up in China and if the encryption is good enough it should take hundreds of years to break it so in the end, why would any mortal care to try?
The short answer is it should not sell iCloud storage that it as no capacity storing. I can already buy cloud storage from Google if I wants to. I trust Apple on security more than other companies. At the very least they should have provided a clear disclaimer.