See A message from Tim Cook and especially Government Information Requests. Its good; well-written and clear. Plus, theres a news story; as of iOS 8, Apple cant unlock a random iPhone. Mind you, this is also an Apple marketing piece.
Grumblers
I hear a certain amount of grumbling along the lines of Its a bunch of lies, Snowden said PRISM is pulling the goodies straight outta the servers. Also, Encryption is useless because a determined adversary will route around it.
Im pretty sure both those arguments are crap. While nobody can know 100% for sure, its increasingly looking like the claims in those PRISM Powerpoints were, um, a little inflated. I tend to believe Cook (and his peers at the other Internet giants) when he says &we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers.
Second, of course no encryption is ever perfect; as James Mickens points out, if an organization like the Mossad thinks they need to getcha, theyre gonna getcha. But remember that with privacy, Its the economics, stupid.
So yeah, I believe Apple is doing substantially the right thing about privacy.
Its marketing, too
Apples privacy docs stress that they dont monetize your information and in Privacy Built In, are full of references to the regrettable practices of other companies who gather and use your information. Let me translate: Google and Facebook store your information and make money from it, tsk tsk.
So why dont Google and Facebook and so on just stop doing that, and be nice like Apple? The trade-off is unsubtle: Google and Facebook and so on give their products away for free; Apple doesnt.
I think its 100% OK to raise the worlds consciousness about the issues with using free ad-supported products. Also, Id welcome the opportunity to pay approximately what the advertisers do for access to Googles goodies. Unfortunately, I suspect Im in a small minority. But still, I wish theyd try.
Anyhow, good for Apple. I hope this pushes the whole industry in the right direction.