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Come on, we're talking about Apple here. The biggest company in the world.

If something like that happens, that's it. It'll be a media storm. Every ounce of credibility they have will be right down the pan. The repercussions would be unthinkable.

Apple are in a rare situation where they have more to lose when complying with an anti-privacy government order, than they do to fight it publicly. Lavabit, on the other hand... well, their CEO could have been captured and minced into burgers, and nobody would have known.

It's a whole different ballpark.
 
Is this new? Ever heard of phone companies? Wireless carriers?
Sounds more like a non-news to me.
 
I keep iMessage turned off. So all my texts are sent through the carrier.

Hopefully straight to the carrier, without Apple involvement.
In this scenario, the carriers actually record your actual text message and can hand that over to authorities. Apple doesn't log actual iMessage content. However, if you use iCloud Backup, then Apple will have whatever iMessages are on your phone, and they can/will hand those over if summoned.
 
I would pay to use a service that would go out of its way to piss of law enforcement.

There have been some services around that end up doing that, and end up going out of business. Lavabit, for example. The reality is, there is very little you're going to be able to do if a higher authority decides it doesn't like that service. Getting the attention by being disruptive is a problem, flying under the radar is the better alternative if you must.
 
I am pretty sure that my comment specifically stated that the 30-day issue was something that could be argued, so not missing the point. Most operations tend to save logs for 30 days, it's fairly standard stuff. Most policies I have written is that we maintain daily incremental backups of logs and data on-site, with off-site backups for 30 days. For mission critical we replicate logs off-site even within the day so that we can recover to almost the last transaction. My guess is no one thought about this and just let it be part of their normal process of backups and purging within the operations procedures. Maybe they review this and decide to reduce the time, but I don't see it as a major issue in the first place. To change is more a policy/process change and very little software change (may be as simple as a parameter in their backup/purge software).
Blimey, you do put a lot of faith in Apple, don't you!
 
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This seems like a non-story, wouldn't basically any service of this type have to keep this sort of data for a brief period of time?

Not when I was associated with this business. There was the ability, but it was not done. I guess there is no longer an expectation of privacy.
 
I get what you're asking but I hate the way that question is phrased... because in the absence of a direct answer and focus on an abstract, I feel anything I could answer with supports the "well then it must be for law enforcement if you can't put your finger directly on some function."

As an engineer, I can think of countless reasons why I would retain a set of logs about anything that occurs on my servers - of which, at the very minimum would be a set of metrics outlining the raison d'etre so I could make future decisions down the line.
Metrics to see how the system should respond, capacities, location-focuses, etc. There are countless reasons why that information is stored, and there probably is not a single purpose, but data is useful. The more data you have the more accurate picture you can draw... maybe 30-days was the limit they could get?
But then if you need that, you anonymise the data, right?
 
I would have thought "Hey Siri" "Hey Google" enabled and Amazon Echo or Dot were far more likely to be the perfect NSA, GCHQ Nirvana.

This thread is "small potatoes", but interesting never the less.
 
I'm having a hard time seeing how this is more than what is already available to law enforcement though the telcos.
Its not any different. Google and Facebook have WAAAAAY more info about everyone, so yeah. This is just more SPOOKY LANGUAGE from Glenn Greenwald.

If you aren't dong anything shady then there is no issue anyway. And I'm sure its been said here a bunch....nothing you do on the web is untraceable unless you live life like Edward Snowden....which no one does so.....

TL;DR

NOT AN ISSUE
[doublepost=1475093675][/doublepost]
That Coolaid just trickles down the throat.... Does it taste good....?
Politics aside....nothing anyone has done since the dawn of the internet is untraceable without going to extreme precautions. Talk about banging the drum "just because".
 
Not an issue. If you didn't do anything wrong, then you don't have anything to worry about. But if you broke the law, then you will be caught.
There's no such thing as Absolute Privacy
And Apple, just like any other company involved in communications, is obligated to keep a log.

Even for those people who think A VPN will cover their tracks, there's a log showing they connected to the VPN and for how long. Law enforcement will then follow the tracks.
 
I am pretty sure that my comment specifically stated that the 30-day issue was something that could be argued, so not missing the point. Most operations tend to save logs for 30 days, it's fairly standard stuff. Most policies I have written is that we maintain daily incremental backups of logs and data on-site, with off-site backups for 30 days. For mission critical we replicate logs off-site even within the day so that we can recover to almost the last transaction. My guess is no one thought about this and just let it be part of their normal process of backups and purging within the operations procedures. Maybe they review this and decide to reduce the time, but I don't see it as a major issue in the first place. To change is more a policy/process change and very little software change (may be as simple as a parameter in their backup/purge software).
Thanks for the lesson in log file management though. Takes me back to my programming days! I never did get to do the tech support though ;)
 
There's no way to be untracked anymore in this society. It seems to be getting more and more difficult.
 
Politics aside....nothing anyone has done since the dawn of the internet is untraceable without going to extreme precautions. Talk about banging the drum "just because".

That was not my point.

However, it is clear that you do not like the sound of my drum and prefer to dance to the beat of other drum. Your choice. However, internet aside, the point remains and issues around privacy have been around forever, whether you choose to accept that, or not.
 
Really? my iMessage kept all message logs since the beginning. I can't even erase text messages cause it will be recovered if the other person contact me with the text message that I deleted. So I contacted Apple about this issue but they are still didn't respond about this.
 
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I keep iMessage turned off. So all my texts are sent through the carrier.

Hopefully straight to the carrier, without Apple involvement.

Scotland Yard, MI5 and the FBI GCHQ and NSA also regularly monitor all messages on these Macrumors forums.

They are particularly interested in the people who have privacy concerns as they are usually the same people with things to hide.

Quick close your Macrumors account and go hide under the staircase...
 
I get what you're asking but I hate the way that question is phrased... because in the absence of a direct answer and focus on an abstract, I feel anything I could answer with supports the "well then it must be for law enforcement if you can't put your finger directly on some function."

As an engineer, I can think of countless reasons why I would retain a set of logs about anything that occurs on my servers - of which, at the very minimum would be a set of metrics outlining the raison d'etre so I could make future decisions down the line.
Metrics to see how the system should respond, capacities, location-focuses, etc. There are countless reasons why that information is stored, and there probably is not a single purpose, but data is useful. The more data you have the more accurate picture you can draw... maybe 30-days was the limit they could get?
I had just responded to someone else and I was looking at it from an operations process perspective, specifically around policies for backup and purge of data. But you add another compelling thought here. And if I may camp on, it will also depend on where they keep this log. If these pings are against a database then this could be the DB log and it would be hard to separate these queries from anything else going on in the database, which supports your perspective. Pretty much the same if these are Unix logs. The only way that I could even argue with you is if it were an isolated log just for these pings. Then maybe one could say that 30-days is not needed for metrics. My thought is that what we are dealing with is not so simple and to reduce the time they keep this information would also reduce a lot of other server or database information. And that is why your argument is sound and strong.
 
Reminds me of stories I've read in the papers where people have been using their phones at the wheel.

They have an accident and delete their call logs thinking they'll get away not realising the mobile phone companies keep a record.
 
No, it doesn't. Apple are completely upfront with their privacy policy.

We're talking about a messaging app, synced across Mac/iOS devices, capable of sending SMS and iMessage, with the entire conversation history available until you delete it. Pinging a device and Apple's servers, to figure out what a device is and how to talk to it, just comes with the territory of this technology.

And again, Apple can't see any of the content from the messages, nor do they store it or even have the facility to decrypt it. Complete non-issue.

Ever heard of a gag order? Don't be so naive about apple being upfront about privacy.
 
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