As a company, Apple prides itself on operating users’ privacy in mind. But for some time now, its security solutions surrounding iCloud have been milquetoast. While some data you back up to iCloud was end-to-end encrypted, like Health data, Apple held the decryption keys to other data, like iMessages, photos, and notes. The benefit there was Apple could help you retrieve much of your important data if you lost your Apple ID login, but Apple having the theoretical power to read our messages didn’t sit well with many people.
Advanced Data Protection for iCloud fixes the issue (for the most part). With it, the number of data types end-to-end encrypted in iCloud backups jumps to 23. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar are the big three that aren’t E2EE, but at least now, Apple doesn’t have the keys to the rest of your data. You can learn more about Advanced Data Protection for iCloud from our post here.