Read this piece by the ACLU praising Apple for recent steps it has taken to protect user privacy from both governments and Apple itself. There are certainly still numerous grounds on which Apple fails Professor Moglen's standards, particularly in the area of rules against sharing, but should we not regard this as significant progress? Or are there reasons to doubt the sincerity/veracity/efficacy of these claims?

"Apple Throws Down the Privacy Gauntlet" via Medium

Cliff's notes for the tl;dr-inclined:

-Apple announces that they have eliminated their ability to extract data from iOS devices, for themselves or on behalf of governments

-ACLU praises Apple for "delivering end-to-end encrypted text, voice, and video communications...(via) iMessage and FaceTime? ," calling these "a much more secure alternative to regular telephone calls and text messages."

You and ACLU are both taking Apple marketing announcements as fact. This is a basic error for lawyers. ACLU is more at fault than you, of course. For the moment, a company that has been most severely complicit with broad-scale spying on its users, forever, and which last week suffered horrendously bad publicity just at the beginning of a major product marketing campaign, has suddenly realized that its new product has software features it forgot to mention before, at announcement, very important to everyone's safety, which they could also provide to existing products (because it's all just software and they control all their endpoints), but which you can only get by buying the new product. This has been greeted by substantial approval from people to whom they can contribute, and by howls of simulated disapproval by people whose every statement is a simulation. Also, their most frightening software competitor is doing it in the next release, as we will be able to verify, because their source code is available under free licenses.

You should not take statements literally from anyone, without checking. Let alone from the reality distortion field leftover from the King of the Undead, Now Dead. So what checking did you do?

-- TomLawrence - 26 Sep 2014

As I understand it this is a security measure as well as a privacy measure that exclusively protects data on the Iphone 6. Is this correct? see Slate ; http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=3875

Further, the new measures do not protect data stored on the "cloud", or an i-tunes back up stored on your computer, see: Think Cops are locked out?. Both services Apple urges consumers to use for functionality and as a matter of prudence.

Accepting this is an example of Apple seeking to commodify privacy is it still then a positive one? Apple is responding, albeit in a limited manner, to consumer demands for greater privacy protection from companies. Is it demonstrative of a growing awareness by users of the need for greater privacy protections? While I accept that law enforcement and the FBI operations will not be impacted by this development, their shrill response can be seen to express underlying concern that citizens are starting to seek digital technology that at least makes them feel their communications are beyond the reach of the authorities?