A follow-up on my aforelinked piece on Priscila Barbosa:

[Uber] detected a ring of people bypassing its background checks in Massachusetts and California, and tipped off the FBI in Boston. Investigators served a warrant to Apple; they wanted to see the iCloud account of a Brazilian guy named Wemerson Dutra Aguiar who, after getting hurt at his job in construction, started driving for apps and later dealing fake accounts. Barbosa didn’t know Aguiar, but a Mafia member had once asked her to email him a Connecticut driver’s license template. She did. By February 2021, law enforcement had circled in on her, and served Apple a search warrant for her iCloud too. In early April, the FBI had tracked Barbosa’s location via her T-Mobile cell number. Investigators staked out her apartment and watched her come and go.

A good reminder that while iCloud is encrypted, by default Apple holds the encryption keys (so they “can help you with data recovery”) and that “only certain data is end-to-end encrypted.” That means the FBI and other law enforcement organizations can get access to your account with a subpoena.

If this concerns you, consider enabling Advanced Data Protection for iCloud (available in iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1)—though note that even then your iCloud Mail, Contacts, and Calendar remain accessible to Apple.