iOS 5 Beta 2 is out and I played around with it a little bit this weekend. Some very cool new features coming our way, including Reminders, which will replace every to-do list I’ve ever paid for. I mean, come on, being able to set a reminder based on your geographical location? Awesome. I can see myself passing by the grocery store on the way home reminding me to stop and buy milk. The future is truly here. The new notification center is greatness as well, with one interface for Twitter, Email, Calendar and SMS notifications. Not that us cool iPhone users will have to use carrier plans any more because Apple is essentially removing the need to use SMS with iMessage. (If you can get all your friends to buy iPhones, that is).
Another new feature is coming our way, iCloud backup. Basically, all your iPhone data will be backed up to the Apple iCloud. Pretty cool eh? All your music, email, documents and app settings such as the stocks you follow, your to-do list, user names, passwords…oh wait.
Do you *really* want to back all this personal data to a cloud provider (i.e. Apple) that just two months ago admitted to storing your entire location history on your local machine? Just go and do a Google Search on “iPhone storing location data” to see how upset we all were. And by “we”, I mean Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Guardian, and pretty much every news outlet and blogger on the planet.
I believe we might be suffering from short term memory loss here, people. This isn’t an exciting feature, it’s scary as hell. We haven’t heard yet from the Apple Spaceship how this data is stored. Is it encrypted? If so, who has the keys? (Hello Dropbox). I quickly looked through the iOS 5 developer release notes and couldn’t find any mention of encryption. Please prove me wrong. Please.
Trust is important. When it comes to data, trust no one.
