In a well written piece titled – Security Trade-Offs, John Gruber eloquently explains the issue surrounding the recent theft of nude celebrities photos by hackers from their iCloud account. An act which I found absolutely disgusting by the way, irrespective of whether these people had weak passwords.
Here’s Gruber take (in rebuttal to David Auerbach’s piece for the Slate):
[su_quote] Over the years I’ve received numerous emails from past and former Genius Bar support staff, telling similar stories of heartbreak. Customer comes in, their iPhone completely broken, or lost, or stolen, and they had precious photos and videos on it. The birth of a child. The last vacation they ever took with a beloved spouse who has since passed away. Did they ever back up their iPhone to a Mac or PC with iTunes? No. In many cases they don’t even know what “iTunes on a PC” even means. Or maybe they connected the iPhone to iTunes once, the day they bought it and needed to activate it, and then never again.
[…]
iCloud backups have not eliminated this problem, but they have made it far less common. This is, like almost everything in tech, a trade-off:
[…]
Ideally, the companies that provide such services minimize the risk of your account being hijacked while maximizing the simplicity and ease of setting it up and using it. But clearly these two goals are in conflict. There’s no way around the fact that the proper balance is somewhere in between maximal security and minimal complexity.
[…]
The problems here are multifaceted and complicated; “don’t trust anything in the cloud” is simplistic and, in its own way, dangerous.[/su_quote]
This is the most sensible article on this issue I’ve read so far.
