Thanks to people in the world like Snowden and other security advocates, companies are making a hard push at enhancing the privacy of new gadgets as they hit the market. iPhone 6 is one of the first gadgets to claim that it prevents the NSA and other agencies from spying in on it.
Apple claims that the new phone encrypts all of you emails, photos, contacts and other information using a unique code to the phone’s owner. That means, if someone wants to spy on you, they either have to break the encryption or request the code from the phone’s owner. Breaking the encryption isn’t at all impossible, but the further we try to encrypt something, the longer it will take to break it bringing “worth” (time, assets, budget, manpower, etc) into question.
Apple claims that it could take over 5 years to break a code (6 characters, lowercase and numeric) if they chose such a route. How accurate this is depends on what we think we know about our government agencies ability to process such information. I am going to take a stab at saying the NSA is a little smarter than that. I mean, our tax money has to be going somewhere right?
Agencies such as the FBI have come out to address their concern about Apple’s move to conceal such information. This could be due to their legitimate concern over national security, or a bluff to lead people into believing what Apple’s claims is actually true (meanwhile they dance upon their new treasure trove of information until the next leak squeals about what they are doing behind everyone’s back).
Regardless, it’s always nice to know that companies are at least trying. Assuming that they didn’t secretly hand a backdoor to the government behind the smoke curtain of publicity (like Microsoft has done in the past).
