The PRISM partners claim is still pretty interesting: Like some other computer security scares (Supermicro?), years later, the PRISM partners slide has never been corroborated by anyone since. And there's a lot of evidence that companies listed on it have actively fought government collection strategies. If these companies were willing participants, Google would not have started encrypting it's datacenter linkages which were subject to NSA fiber taps, Apple wouldn't have continually sought to improve device encryption to defeat law enforcement, etc.
It is true most web services are impossible to audit the privacy of, as always, storing things yourself on hardware you control is the safest, but I'd argue that Google and Apple have very clearly different stances, if you follow the money.
>If these companies were willing participants, Google would not have started encrypting it's datacenter linkages which were subject to NSA fiber taps, Apple wouldn't have continually sought to improve device encryption to defeat law enforcement, etc.
None of this is convincing, these open ended musings have other answers like, perhaps this infrastructure change was needed to protect against the compromised backbone routers (revealed later by Shadow Brokers release) which it turns out anybody could tap, device encryption, which handy, has had lots of oopsies and gotchas over time which one could almost suspect were planted.
Last year Apple relented and allowed a dead man's family to retrieve photos even though nobody knew the login information. Hm, but I was told by people here on Hacker News and in tech journalism that Apple DOESN'T EVEN HAVE THE CAPABILITY to do this.
It is true most web services are impossible to audit the privacy of, as always, storing things yourself on hardware you control is the safest, but I'd argue that Google and Apple have very clearly different stances, if you follow the money.