In today’s usage scenarios, messaging are not entirely about the text. Users exchange pictures and short videos, voice recordings and their current locations. These types of data are an important part of conversation histories; they can be just as valuable evidence as the text content of the chat.
We also trust these companies in ways that we do not understand yet. How many of you trust Apple? No voting… Just me 🙂 Damn! OK. May I ask you a very good question. Trusting to do what? Trusting when they say: “iMessages are end-to-end encrypted”? I mean, with all of that massive security engineering, to make sure it’s as good as it can be, so they genuinely believe they’ve done that. I do, generally, they’re great people. But… people believe themselves they can defend themselves against the Russians. If the Russians specifically targeted Apple, it’s only they can defend themselves. – Ian Levy, director at the GCHQ on anniversary of the foundation of the FIPR event that was held on 29/04/2018).