Is Apple Letting the NSA Spy on You?

This isn’t the first time Apple and other tech companies have been accused of handing over private information to the government. In fact, not by a long shot! But, it has happened again, and Apple is, as always, denying helping any government by giving your personal info unless a warrant was issued.

“Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products. We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security.”

The most recent accusation that this quote is in response to claimed that Apple worked with the NSA to hack into user accounts on iPhones for info about those individuals. This reminds me of back in the Summer of 2013 when many tech companies were accused of basically the same thing but in regard to the U.S. government’s Prism program, and Apple wrote an article on its website explaining that they wouldn’t ever violate their users’ privacy rights.

“We first heard of the government’s ‘Prism’ program when news organizations asked us about it on June 6. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order,” said Apple. They also clarified that, “regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities.”

However, not everyone is so convinced the big tech giant is so private about its users’ info. Jonathan Appelbaum, a security expert, said that the NSA has a program called DROPOUT JEEP that allows them to access contacts, text messages, voicemail, and even the iPhone’s microphone and camera. He added that he doesn’t believe that Apple DOESN’T help the NSA with this.

The unfortunate part of all of this is that we can’t really know for sure if any of this is actually going on, so there’s not much we can do about it. The U.S. has been called out on numerous occasions for spying on different people and governments, yet they seem to keep doing it. Even the White House called it unconstitutional and ordered the program to change how it’s operating to become actually legal! Either way, I guess that’s the world we live in, and for now, we’ll just have to deal with it or not use our phones (which obviously won’t happen). What do you think about the NSA and its operations? Leave us a comment below!

 

 

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