3 ms·

I assume the query from Apple to the phone is not "are these (potentially spoofed) coordinates X trusted", but rather "is your current location trusted". The la

I assume the query from Apple to the phone is not "are these (potentially spoofed) coordinates X trusted", but rather "is your current location trusted". The later doesn't seem like it would leak any useful information to law enforcement, as well as being harder for an attacker to forge during the password-change process. The easier software update for Apple, technically speaking, then would probably just be to have a particular phone by a particular user continuously report its particular location. It seems doubtful Apple would currently add such a backdoor though. However, the radio towers need to triangulate your location to be able to communicate with you, which is not questionable, since that is their purpose. But then storing that information for any non-trivial length of time seems fairly questionable to me too.

olliej 3y ago
I'm not sure what you're exactly saying so we might be talking at cross purposes. I also see this was 4 days ago so not sure if you'll ever see my response let alone reply :D (hello future person who happens to see this!) On Mac+iOS your devices learn places where they often stay, that information is never exposed to apple at all. I can't recall from the massive product security document whether these are "never leave the device" or "only ever in the end-to-end encrypted synchronized storage". Hence without an update that apple pushed to every device to specifically undermined that privacy protection, there's no way for apple to answer the question of "which devices hang out around this location". If you get to the point of law enforcement being able to do that, then no amount of device security on any device matters, because even if you were to try and use a custom android image we've reached a point where law enforcement could also just say "a device cannot boot an OS it cannot confirm will obey the spy-on-users legislation". That's why it's so important that these various nonsense laws of compelled spying for any purpose get blocked.

olliej 3y ago

I'm not sure what you're exactly saying so we might be talking at cross purposes. I also see this was 4 days ago so not sure if you'll ever see my response let alone reply :D (hello future person who happens to see this!) On Mac+iOS your devices learn places where they often stay, that information is never exposed to apple at all. I can't recall from the massive product security document whether these are "never leave the device" or "only ever in the end-to-end encrypted synchronized storage". Hence without an update that apple pushed to every device to specifically undermined that privacy protection, there's no way for apple to answer the question of "which devices hang out around this location". If you get to the point of law enforcement being able to do that, then no amount of device security on any device matters, because even if you were to try and use a custom android image we've reached a point where law enforcement could also just say "a device cannot boot an OS it cannot confirm will obey the spy-on-users legislation". That's why it's so important that these various nonsense laws of compelled spying for any purpose get blocked.