According to a new article by James Vincent in The Independent, "Apple has been accused of intentionally installing security backdoors in some 600 million iOS devices that offer surveillance-level access to data including photos, browsing history and GPS locations.

The vulnerabilities were uncovered by security expert Jonathan Zdziarski, who presented an academic paper on the subject at a hacker conference in New York last Friday.

Apple has issued a statement in response to the allegations saying that the company’s “diagnostic functions do not compromise user privacy and security,” but Zdziarski has responded by noting that these services “dish out data” regardless of whether the user has agreed to diagnostics.

“There is no way to disable these mechanisms,” Zdziarski writes on his personal blog. “This makes it much harder to believe that Apple is actually telling the truth here.”

...Zdziarski has since repeated his assertions that the amount of information offered by these backdoors is unprecedented: “These services break the promise that Apple makes with the consumer when they enter a backup password; that the data on their device will only come off the phone encrypted.

“The consumer is also not aware of these mechanisms, nor are they prompted in any way by the device. There is simply no way to justify the massive leak of data as a result of these services, and without any explicit consent by the user.”

He adds that he is in no way accusing Apple of working directly with security agencies but that he suspects that "some of these services may have been used by [the] NSA to collect data"."

Deb Gaber