1. My understanding is that FISA requests data using warrants. So your statement that Apple divulges this information without a ‘warrant’ would be false if this is correct.

2. You once again repeat the outright lie that Apple is collecting a person’s travel history.

All you are actually referring to is that they receive TCP connections and so know people’s IP addresses. Just like anyone else who operates any web service.

In an earlier comment on this thread, you more honestly state that IP addresses can be used to infer coarse location data. This is correct.

As we have discussed before, it’s a lie to claim that Apple is recording people’s travel history, because you have no evidence that these recordings are in fact being made. Only that they could be.

It’s entirely possible that they never actually do perform geolocation on the log data, and that they scrub or anonymize IP addresses before storing them longer term. They state that they use such practices in general.

I can’t prove that they use these practices with this data, so it would be a lie to say I know they don’t record people’s travel history, just as it is a lie every time you say they do.

Please either provide evidence or stop repeating this lie.

As far your comment that “Compelled
By law is a dodge”.

It’s not a dodge - either they are compelled by law, or they are not.

You didn’t actually answer that question, I note. Not answering a question seems more obviously like a dodge!

You gave the impression that they are not compelled by law, but I don’t think that is true.

Also, this raises the question, what is being dodged?

If Apple were giving out information about users without being compelled by law, then that would be a strong indicator that they didn’t care about privacy, but I don’t think this is true.

As to ‘building a giant trove of activity history” about users - Aside from your lie about Apple recording people’s travel history, what ‘Activity History’ are you referring to here?

It’s true that there could be a more sophisticated E2E mechanism to place most user data beyond Apple’s ability to provide it when compelled.

It’s also true that iCloud backups are not secure.

Users who have reason to be concerned about this should not opt-in to these backups.

Apple should definitely provide a way for backups to be E2E encrypted.

There is an unproven assertion that they haven’t done this due to pressure from the FBI. This may be true.

It’s also true that your complaint about holding user data applies to almost every single YC company, and almost every single web service* .

Perhaps you have some examples of companies that handle things the way I think we’d both like? I can’t think of a good one.

There are obvious usability issues and technical challenges that need to be overcome in order to apply E2E to all data at rest.

Even when they do roll it out, I expect it to be opt-in and progressive, much as FDE was rolled out slowly over many years. Users will need to make decisions to sacrifice things like the web versions of apps.

The risk of data loss if handled incorrectly is much higher than the chance of innocently being one of the 30,000 people you say are targeted by FISA.

This is not to downplay the concern. I think it’s very important that this problem be solved and I think Apple should be one of the leaders in solving it.

Again, if you have an example of someone who has already solved all of these problems, that would be helpful

Let’s not pretend this is trivial to do at scale.

The fact that they haven’t solved problems that nobody else has solved either, is really evidence of very little.

Also you say it’s safe to assume that FISA warrants require all data a provider has on a user. Is it? Do we have any evidence of that? I’m sure some requests are blanket requests, but do we know that they all are? Many could be superficial requests to eliminate or include people from one pool or another.