To be honest, In this day and age, it would be naive for anyone to think they have a modicum of privacy on the internet. Apple or any company can claim all they want that they take security and privacy seriously—and they very well may—but when you get right down to it, it's all code. And coding will invariably have holes that are just waiting to get exploited, if not by the government then by hackers.
That's not the point, is it? This is about trust. Yes, there may security holes in code, but we need to be able to trust that our data is not given away willy nilly and is being protected to the best of their abilities. Apple has proven time and again that they do value their user privacy and security and work very hard to ensure that it does not fall into the "wrong" hands. All of Apple's communication services use end-to-end encryption, when applicable.
Just maybe Yahoo could have made a better choice by spending their effort and money on security. They might have avoided the 500,000,000 accounts being hacked or at least discovered it in under 2 years. You can stick a fork in Yahoo, for me, they're done.
Actually it may not be, the laws only says you can not use information you gather this way to prosecute someone. The govern can listen and collect what they want, using that information is where it become illegal. Our Laws only say they can not use it against you.
wrong. the NSA is barred from domestic spying. thats the role of law enforcement, not intelligence. its one thing that makes america great. so if the NSA is cheating then everybody needs to know about it and corrections made. its our government, not theirs.
It is not like the feds were reading all your emails. They used an automated system to look for certain keywords which probably generated 99.999% false positives anyway. The thing we don't know is what other email providers were also asked to cooperate. In the case of Yahoo someone blew the whistle but I would not be surprised if all the major providers were/are doing the very same thing, but we just don't know.
So the incompetent Yahoo executive class rolled over for the Feds, installed possibly illegal data mining software without telling their security people who discovered it thinking that it the work of nefarious hackers, so they leave in protest and than Yahoo suffers a massive data breach.
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That's not the point, is it? This is about trust. Yes, there may security holes in code, but we need to be able to trust that our data is not given away willy nilly and is being protected to the best of their abilities. Apple has proven time and again that they do value their user privacy and security and work very hard to ensure that it does not fall into the "wrong" hands. All of Apple's communication services use end-to-end encryption, when applicable.