Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back
69 comments
·April 21, 2025crazygringo
wmf
If Apple can unlock the account from your stolen iPhone they can also unlock your account for the gestapo. Whether it's worth throwing normal people under the bus to protect a few dissidents is a matter of values on which people are going to have differing opinions of course.
crazygringo
That doesn't make sense. This isn't a technical hurdle, is it? Apple already can unlock your account "for the gestapo" if they choose to.
If the users have enabled Advanced Data Protection and don't have another Apple device, then I can understand why it would be lost for good. But that doesn't seem to be the case in these lawsuits. They make it clear that Apple has access to the data, and could transfer/restore it if they wanted to.
JumpCrisscross
> Apple already can unlock your account "for the gestapo" if they choose to
But they don't.
IlikeKitties
This irks me A LOT and is simplified to the point of being incorrect, yet lots of people here make the same logical errors.
Protecting the contents of peoples devices and accounts with strong encryption and hardware security is great for the individual and protects them from thieves and governments alike. If Apple designed their devices so that they cannot unencrypt the content without the users secret passsword, that's sensible for a lot of users.
But E-Mail Addresses and Accounts are derivatives of your identity and companies should have ways of returning your accounts to you, even if the content is lost, in case of stolen identities.
I am pretty paranoid about this stuff and only store private data using encryption and on trusted devices running mostly hardened FOSS software (Graphene OS, Fedora Secure Blue, OpenSuse MicroOS, etc.) and my backups are rcloned encrypted to the cloud. Yet for my most important e-mail that is bound to paypal, banking, shopping etc. I use posteo. They do this exactly right. I have personally tested contacting their support to return access to the e-mail address in case of a "lost password". After some validation, they returned access for it to me, but the encrypted content was unrecoverable. That is exactly what any responsible company should do.
throwaway48476
The people suing didn't turn on E2E encryption. The government could already get access to their data via subpoena. Apple already has access to their data as well. Apple just doesn't want to be forced into doing basic customer service.
BolexNOLA
>to protect a few dissidents
Your opinion seems to be to trivialize how important this can be, which fine you do you, but I think saying it only protects "a few dissidents" is a bit ridiculous.
Every protest I've filmed at I hit the lock button 5 times so it forces a passcode. I feel secure knowing the police can't just take it and start scrolling - they need a warrant or they're bust.
You don't have to be a dissident to need your privacy.
VincentEvans
>hit lock button 5 times so it forces a passcode
I didn’t know what that meant - so I googled it. And it says something entirely different….
Quote: Pressing the lock button (or side button) five times quickly on an iPhone or many Android devices will activate Emergency SOS. This will prompt a countdown and eventually, if not cancelled, initiate a call to emergency services, potentially alerting emergency contacts and sharing your location.
SR2Z
I think the point here is that either Apple has the technical ability to access your account (in which case they will be forced to do it by the government regardless) or they don't (in which case this lawsuit is ridiculous).
The middle ground option where Apple has the ability to do this but is also somehow able to take a stand against the government is kind of difficult to support, because it doesn't make much sense.
cyral
> Is there some kind of huge liability question if they ever facilitate giving access to the wrong person?
This is what I was thinking as I read the article. Imagine what will be written about them when they do give iCloud access to an impostor. Depending on what's on their account thieves could dedicate a ton of time to social engineering Apple into recovering the account. The article mentions police reports being "proof", but that doesn't seem like solid evidence considering how easy it could be to fake a police report from one of the tens of thousands of jurisdictions in the US. This is a problem for a lot of industries actually, i.e. banks and death certificates.
duskwuff
> Surely it's easy enough to define some kind of verification process based on various pieces -- phone number, credit card, purchase receipt, etc. -- and requiring a police report to be filed or something.
Apple has such a process in place: https://support.apple.com/en-us/118574 (The details aren't all laid out on that web page, but Apple support may ask for information like purchase records to confirm ownership.)
What I think is at issue here is that it will only restore access to an account which is not currently being accessed. If an account is being accessed from a logged-in device, Apple is reluctant to deny the current user access to that account and restore it to another party.
And, quite honestly, I can see where Apple is coming from with this policy. Arbitrating access to a contested account can get really messy (e.g. consider a scenario where an abusive partner is trying to access the victim's online accounts).
crote
I think you're jumping the gun here.
An account is supposed to belong to a single person. If you are able to definitively prove that you are that person (for example, by showing up to an Apple store with your ID card), you should be able to restore access to it. An abusive partner won't have access to that.
Refusing restoration when someone else has access to it is understandable, but it works the other way around as well: an abusive partner would be able to prevent the legitimate owner from accessing the account.
I think it's far more likely that Apple just can't be bothered. Dealing with stuff like this is messy and complicated, and they aren't going to lose any revenue from those few thousand people a year losing their account and all their data.
JumpCrisscross
> Surely it's easy enough to define some kind of verification process based on various pieces -- phone number, credit card, purchase receipt, etc. -- and requiring a police report to be filed or something
Given the stakes, Cupertino may have decided that it does not wish to arbiter such disputes. Requiring a court order shifts the dispute to that forum.
wmf
Will Apple obey court orders? Have they ever?
JumpCrisscross
> Will Apple obey court orders? Have they ever?
What on earth are you referring to?
aianus
They don’t want to give these powers to a large number of customer service reps who can be bribed or coerced or socially engineered into transferring accounts to bad guys.
Look what happened to the mobile carriers and sim-jacking.
popalchemist
My gut tells me that they don't want to either set the precedent or let it be known that they can access your data and give/revoke access remotely, because it pokes a hole in their E2E encryption claims and opens the door to demands for backdoor access from governments.
lxgr
Having access but pretending not to seems like the worst of both worlds.
Various entities will still be able to get to the data, while users might incorrectly assume that that's not the case.
throwaway48476
In this case it wasn't E2E encrypted in the first place.
lelandbatey
It doesn't "poke a hole" in anything. The only way you get the full E2E encryption Apple talks about is if you enable "Advanced Data Protection", which none of the people in the article did, per the article. Apple could decrypt and return the data because Apple has the keys. Apple is refusing to do so.
leptons
>People spend thousands of dollars on Apple devices
As long as the people cut off from the walled garden amount to less than a rounding error in Apple's bottom line, they simply don't care. They will only care when a judge forces them to care, as we had to find out the hard way in a class action lawsuit against Apple. We won, but they lost us as lifetime customers. My wife even owns Apple stock and refuses to buy anything else from them and warns others against it. They could have made it right for practically no cost to them, but they chose the dick move, and they were forced to pay out in the end anyway.
Henchman21
[flagged]
nashashmi
My cousin’s phone was stolen in San Francisco. My mom’s phone was hooked up to the same account. Somehow the thief was able to change the account password and email account to something else. Now my mom cannot reset her phone because she doesn’t have access to the thieves account.
lxgr
> Somehow the thief was able to change the account password and email account
That would be the fact that Apple lets anybody that knows the passcode reset the iCloud password as well, without any further authentication. And the passcode can be shoulder surfed by the thief...
"Stolen device protection" was developed as a response to a wave of such thefts: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120340
It seems like a good step forward but still not perfect, and I believe it's not on by default.
On the other side, with Advanced Data Protection, it seems shockingly easy to permanently lock oneself out of an iCloud account: As far as I understand, there is absolutely no way to recover an account protected that way if the recovery code is lost – not even by deleting all data currently stored on it and starting from scratch (e.g. from a local backup).
Given the fact that an iCloud account doesn't only contain a big pile of data, but access to some purchased products and services (subscriptions, app purchases, iTunes songs, the Apple Card etc.), that seems like a pretty big oversight.
XorNot
Admittedly we in security do a very poor job on equipping users with useful threat models: i.e. the number of times people either don't turn on any sort of security, or turn on extremely aggressive security but don't write down and store a recovery code is too damn high.
crote
And it's made even worse by companies not wanting to deal with meatspace. Secure account recovery isn't too difficult if you're willing to do ID verification in physical stores, but no tech company wants to do that.
alabastervlog
It took me a minute to figure out how this works, but it must have something to do with using a "lost password" email reset on the iCloud account, and having the relevant email account logged in (or saved to the password manager) on the phone itself, so that all you need is the passcode to get into the iCloud account. Something like that?
JKCalhoun
I still can't figure it out.
My daughter had her iPhone stolen in L.A. — she immediately wiped it remotely. The thieves were unable to access it.
I got her a new iPhone pretty fast (the budget one) and she was back in business, back in her iCloud account. (She was one of those that saw her device head to Asia. She got a handful of text messages pleading with her to remove the stolen device from her account but she ignored them.)
alabastervlog
Yeah, that's why I'm having to think at it some to figure out what's going on here. Usually I need my iCloud password to do anything related to that account, so I guess they're using some kind of iCloud password reset bypass that relies on the phone having access to necessary reset-related accounts (like email—though, IDK, I don't think I've ever tried to "lost password" reset my iCloud account, so I'm not sure if even that's enough)
wmf
You got lucky with dumb thieves.
Mystery-Machine
> she immediately wiped it remotely > She was one of those that saw her device head to Asia
What, the guy just jumped into the Pacific and started swimming?
justjonathan
I believe “She” here refers to the original owner (the victim). Apple offers a feature to remotely wipe your device if lost, and that was what I understood the owner to have done. I’ve done the same thing for a stolen iPhone.
crazygringo
Yup, I'm guessing that's it:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102656
This article seems to make it pretty clear that having a passcode on a signed-in device is enough to reset the password.
XorNot
That seems like an insane security hole really.
One of the big distinctions I make in my life is whether a passcode is being typed in frequently and in view of the public. And since these are shorter codes, the entity on guessing from a distance is much lower.
crote
The even more insane security hole is allowing someone with physical access and the password to permanently lock out all recovery options.
tonyedgecombe
Presumably they will need mail notifications enabled on the Lock Screen as well.
alabastervlog
The described attack in TFA seems to involve learning the phone owner's passcode (for the phone), so no lock screen shenanigans needed.
null
anonym29
Trust the megacorporations.
Trust your government.
"It works well for everyone else, why are you being so weird by not doing what everyone else does?"
Grant the megacorporations control over your entire life.
Your government will protect you from the megacorporations.
"Self hosting? Open source? Linux? You're weird, just get an iPhone."
The megacorporations never make mistakes.
The government never makes mistakes either.
"What's wrong with you? Are you seriously too poor to afford an iPhone? Get a blue bubble already."
The megacorporations never lie to you, they never manipulate you.
Even if they tried, your trustworthy government would stop them.
This message brought to you by social conformity norms that are most certainly NOT subtly reinforced by the same billionaires and trillion dollar companies that benefit from them.
/s
encom
Social Credit Score++
mmmlinux
This sounds a lot like "I forgot my ultimate recovery password, but its someone else's fault."
throwaway48476
A security model that the user does not understand and contains traps is not a good security model.
Hizonner
OK, but what model would you suggest?
Apple has no adequate way to actually verify who anybody is without (a) forcing them to physically visit one of a small number of offices (it can't be every store), and (b) probably charging a significant fee to cover the cost of doing real verification.
And even that demands assuming that the identifying information on the account is right.
throwaway48476
For account recovery in store verification is viable. They're already collected data on their customers via payment processors.
I would also force users to watch a video explaining the security features and quiz them before turning them on. You can't expect users to immediately understand how the security model works.
oarsinsync
> Apple has no adequate way to actually verify who anybody is without (a) forcing them to physically visit one of a small number of offices (it can't be every store), and (b) probably charging a significant fee to cover the cost of doing real verification.
My bank is able to verify me remotely to login to their app from a new device in under 15 minutes, just with a photo of my ID card and a video of my face. And the bank is liable for any losses caused if they misidentify me.
Why can my bank do it but apple cant?
mingus88
I have a hard time believing this when they also have Apple Cash and Apple Pay.
Even with their strong privacy fundamentals they know more about their account holders than any single business should.
wmf
The person in the article who has their whole professional life in a stolen Apple account would probably be happy to visit Apple HQ in person.
newsclues
Digital identity is an essential aspect of modern life.
The fact that the government doesn’t have a great standard for identity and it’s left to banks and tech companies is crazy.
EA-3167
Is there a security model that's both highly secure, and foolproof regardless of the mental faculties of potentially billions of diverse users? I think the answer is, "Obviously not," so the real question is whether or not the necessary compromises made here represent acceptable measures.
throwaway48476
Security requires education. A new purely mechanical lock took two weeks before it was routine.
bell-cot
Yes.
But in general, the way that most humans "naturally expect" such things to work is simply incompatible with the usually-extremely-convenient nature of computer accounts and cloud services.
throwaway48476
Then it is too convenient.
JCattheATM
Not exactly helpful, but I have little sympathy for people who put their digital lives in the control of a free service from a company, that, frankly, doesn't care about you at all - 'consumers are the product', etc etc.
voidspark
It's not a free service. One of them had a 2TB+ iCloud account. That has a monthly cost. Not free. The free plan only gives you 5GB storage. Apple is not an advertising company. We pay for the phone and we pay for iCloud.
tacker2000
Why should Apple open this can of worms and give users access to locked out data. How would this process even work on a larger scale?
In the end if you dont backup your data locally, then its not your data and you risk losing it.
If your business shuts down because you lost your phone its your own fault for not mitigating this type of risk enough.
mingus88
Have you ever tried to fully backup data from iCloud?
I try to do it every month because I am that type of techie. They don’t make it easy.
For photos, i have a 2TB family plan. There is no export functionality I can centrally backup my families photos and shared albums
The supported way to do this is to use a Mac, force it to store all images locally in settings, then highlight all your albums and File->export
This takes hours. I need to stay connected to my network drive because I don’t have 4TB of local storage on my laptop. If there is a failure it’s game over. You can’t resume or even know what failed. There is a tiny progress bar icon to work with. That’s all
iCloud Drive? Same thing. You need to force it to sync all your files, and there is no way to know if it’s hung or what. You can’t do this as family account owner for everyone.
What about all that app data that is saved to iCloud? I don’t even know how to access that to back it up.
Apple makes many things very easy and other things practically impossible.
Backing up your entire iCloud data for disaster recovery is one of those things that’s basically impossible.
monster_truck
I've found it much easier to request a copy of my data and download it all in 25gb chunks. It's still not great, the download speeds are extremely slow and they are prone to failure. For being something that I (used to) pay for, this was one of the reasons I stopped.
deadbabe
This isn’t that hard, you can just automate this with a script and cron job running on a cheap Mac mini.
lelandbatey
The data isn't full E2E encrypted and unreachable in all these cases in the article. The iCloud default is not to encrypt things such that Apple can't decrypt the data; a user has to enable "Advanced Data Protection" for that to happen.
Apple could decrypt and return all the user data in all the cases in the article. They aren't doing that. Some folks are rightly pointing out "what is the point of storing all my stuff in your cloud if you're going to lock me out if I lose my phone?" That's not a backup, that's just paying a monthly fee to store more than what your phone alone can store.
betimsl
Apple’s encryption, is designed with end-to-end encryption for many types of data.
Some facts:
Only the user's devices hold the keys to decrypt the data.
Apple cannot decrypt it, even if served a subpoena.
lxgr
Then delete that data and let the user start over. How come Apple gets to hold iTunes purchases (apps, movies etc.) and somebody's email address hostage just because they also happen to store some end-to-end encrypted data on the same cloud account?
Just imagine Google letting people "brick" their accounts because they have a password protected PDF in their Google Drive they don't remember the password for...
And that's to say nothing about the not end-to-end encrypted data, which is still the default for most things in iCloud accounts (without ADP enabled).
lelandbatey
Read the article, that's not true by default, the only way you get that level of cryptographic protection is if you enable "Advanced Data Protection". None of the people in the article did that, all of them can trivially prove they are who they say they are via government documents, Apple could decrypt their data and return it, but Apple is refusing to do so.
I'm curious why Apple has let it get this far that court cases are underway and WaPo is writing an article about it.
What's in it for Apple? Surely it's easy enough to define some kind of verification process based on various pieces -- phone number, credit card, purchase receipt, etc. -- and requiring a police report to be filed or something.
And this isn't like Google or Facebook where accounts are free, preventing manual account recovery from being scalable. People spend thousands of dollars on Apple devices across phones and laptops and more. People who don't spend money on Apple generally aren't keeping their data in iCloud.
I'm confused because it seems like the rational, profitable thing for Apple to do here is to have these procedures for account recovery. So what's stopping them? Is there some kind of huge liability question if they ever facilitate giving access to the wrong person?