iPhone Users: Hide Your Photos, E-mails, and Texts from Police with iOS 8

Congratulations to Apple and win for privacy! This week marks the launch of the iPhone 6 models and more importantly iOS 8.

Privacy is a key feature of iOS 8. Apple says its new mobile operating system puts text messages, e-mails, photos and other data out of the reach of police — even if authorities present the company with a search warrant.

Apple says reports that iOS 8 has a new encryption that will no longer allow the company to bypass a customer’s passcode to access the customer's data.

“So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8,”

If you have any version of iOS 7 or earlier, your operating system allows the company to bypass your password.

This smartphone setting is gobbling up data and costing you money

BEWARE: If you back your information on iCloud, the protection from warrants disappears, since Apple will comply with warrants to turn over information on its servers.

But Apple clearly senses that added privacy protections are a selling point for its products.

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced on his blog:

I want to be absolutely clear that 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. And we never will.”

Important information to secure your device:

Apple has issued some new advice about how to keep your data on its devices secure, and how to make sure its covered by the new rulings.

Set a passcode on all Apple devices, ‘the more complex, the better.’
Owners of an iPhone 5S or later should enable Touch ID.
Enable Find My iPhone, iPad, and Mac, to locate devices if they’re lost or stolen.
With iOS 8, if users choose to use iCloud when setting up a new device, Find My iPhone will be enabled automatically.
Activation Lock, which is built into Find My iPhone, also prevents an iOS device from being reactivated without a user’s permission, even if they’ve already erased it remotely.
Choose a strong, unique Apple ID password, which contains at least one letter, have at least one capital letter and number, not contain multiple identical consecutive characters and be at least eight characters long.
Users should also make the answers to their security questions hard to guess, and select new security questions or change their answers regularly.
Turn on two-step veriﬁcation, by going to Manage My Apple ID.