Law enforcement officials may not be able to read your iMessages thanks to Apple's encryption, but they may get to your iMessage contacts.
Apple has made great waves over the years about its dedication to protecting user data and its high encryption to ensure privacy and security. Although the company does not store extensive amounts of user data on its servers, it still stores some details that authorities could access.
As The Intercept notes in a new report, end-to-end encryption means that not even Apple can access your iMessages, but Apple still knows which phone numbers you have in your iMessage contacts. This is because when an iPhone user starts typing a phone number, the iPhone pings Apple's servers to check whether the number is for another iOS device.
If it is, Apple will send all messages using its own iMessage service, thus bypassing other expenses you might otherwise incur with normal messaging. If the number does not correspond to another iOS device, Apple will send your messages as a standard text message. Users can easily tell the difference between the two by color: iMessages (iOS to iOS) are shown in blue, while standard texts (iOS to others) are in green.
Consequently, it's hardly a shock to learn that Apple's servers are pinged for each number a user is messaging. The bigger news, however, is the fact that Apple stores that data for 30 days.
This doesn't change the fact that Apple doesn't have a lot of information regarding its users' text messages. Compared with the level of access a cellular provider has on standard text messages on its network, Apple barely scratches the surface.
While carriers would be able to check what message users sent, when and even where the user was located when sending the message, Apple would only be able to see which number you tried to ping to send a message. In other words, the company doesn't have access to your actual messages, it only knows that you typed a certain number to send a message.
That's exactly what Apple can share with law enforcement agencies if so required by a warrant or a court order. It can't share information it doesn't have, such as the content of your messages, but it can share the phone numbers you typed in — in most cases, likely the phone numbers of your contacts.
While this is nothing alarming or out of the ordinary, it goes to show that even with advanced encryption, a digital trail still remains. The Intercept sees it as slightly more sensitive:
"A list of the people you choose to associate with can be just as sensitive as your messages with those people. It requires little stretching of the imagination to come up with a scenario in which the fact that you swapped numbers with someone at some point in the past could be construed as incriminating or compromising," notes the publication.
It remains unclear at this point why Apple retains a list of the phone numbers you've typed into Messages, even if you never actually sent a message to that number.
Apple reportedly gets the phone numbers when users open a new chat window and select a contact or type in a number to start a conversation, but it's not clear when the system triggers the queries or how often.
