At this point, I'm willing to accept that Apple has an honest intent (to the extent that any corporate entity has any meaningful intent to do anything) to provide reasonable security on its new devices and related cloud systems. This is at least in part because they are reasonably transparent about how far their existing measures go and they don't seem to have a track record of exaggerating claims in this area.
Clearly they could still go significantly further, as the lack of end-to-end encryption for things like iCloud backups of photos demonstrates.
Another black mark against them for now is their persistence in walling off their ecosystem so much that iCloud (or maybe iTunes running on additional Apple equipment) is the only reasonably usable and future-proof method of transferring data between devices. It really should be possible to import and export common types of data like calendars, photos, contacts and notes in standard formats using standard protocols, and it's clearly a deliberate policy not to support this.
Even so, the world of iOS now appears to be in an entirely different class to the Android ecosystem in terms of privacy and data protection. At least with Apple devices, you can (if you're willing to spend an hour or so toggling settings) basically turn off all of the data sharing and remote services if you just want a modern phone with standard communications tools like web and email available. And at least Apple doesn't have an obvious commercial interest in undermining its own devices' privacy safeguards.
Clearly they could still go significantly further, as the lack of end-to-end encryption for things like iCloud backups of photos demonstrates.
Another black mark against them for now is their persistence in walling off their ecosystem so much that iCloud (or maybe iTunes running on additional Apple equipment) is the only reasonably usable and future-proof method of transferring data between devices. It really should be possible to import and export common types of data like calendars, photos, contacts and notes in standard formats using standard protocols, and it's clearly a deliberate policy not to support this.
Even so, the world of iOS now appears to be in an entirely different class to the Android ecosystem in terms of privacy and data protection. At least with Apple devices, you can (if you're willing to spend an hour or so toggling settings) basically turn off all of the data sharing and remote services if you just want a modern phone with standard communications tools like web and email available. And at least Apple doesn't have an obvious commercial interest in undermining its own devices' privacy safeguards.