Story 2014-11-02 2TVZ How one man found his private files on the Apple Cloud without his consent

How one man found his private files on the Apple Cloud without his consent

by
Anonymous Coward
in security on (#2TVZ)
While last week Apple was being hailed as the white knight of user privacy while this week they are being called on for uploading files to icloud without sufficient warning. Bad times for Apple, whose blunder was a big one, and is generating a lot of buzz. The Washington Post reports:
[Security researcher Jeffrey Paul] was not alone in either his frustration or surprise. Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew D. Green tweeted his dismay after realizing that some private notes had found their way to iCloud. Bruce Schneier, another prominent cryptography expert, wrote a blog post calling the automatic saving function "both dangerous and poorly documented" by Apple.

The criticism was all the more notable because its target, Apple, had just enjoyed weeks of applause within the computer security community for releasing a bold new form of smartphone encryption capable of thwarting government searches - even when police got warrants. Yet here was an awkward flip side: Police still can gain access to files stored on cloud services, and Apple seemed determined to migrate more and more data to them.
Reply 3 comments

Dropbox does this too (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-11-03 08:05 (#2TW8)

I decided to give dropbox a go for its autosync feature. Worked great. Take a picture or video and the file would sync to DB if there was internet connectivity. Great. After a while I stopped using it and decided to clean up a bit. I found 1GB of personal photos had been uploaded from the SD card. WTF? I knew that new photos would sync but had no idea 1 GB of my mobile plan was blown on those photos. Luckily those days I had 3 GB quota. If it happened today I would be paying hundreds in excess data charges. The part about semi nude pictures of me being uploaded without my permission also bothers me. Now I have my own cloud.

Re: Dropbox does this too (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-11-03 11:21 (#2TWB)

So does Google. My phone started bothering me to turn on autosync something or other and as soon as I figured out what it was doing I shut it the hell off. Lots and lots of pictures going from my phone to Google and some of it becoming available via G+ or something (or at least, being at risk of that happening) made my blood run cold. I don't want anything autosyncing ever, unless I set it up myself. I saved a stupid from Reddit to my Downloads folder on my tablet, and later found it synced to my Android phone a bit later - WTF? Not what I wanted, and good thing it was a stupid cat picture and not something else ...

Not happy about this new autosync world - I know it's being portrayed as a convenience but to me it's a way bigger risk than it is a convenience.

Re: Dropbox does this too (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-11-03 13:28 (#2TWF)

Somehow my contacts were already in my new phone when I went to do the import.. not just the ones that were on the sim card..... and I was using a new gmail account for it. ?!?!? It freaks me out what these anti-social companies think they have a right to do... just because they hide it 40 pages into a eula.