So the big story this week is obviously the Apple/FBI thing. A judge ordered Apple to help unlock the phone from the San Bernardino shooting, and Tim Cook wrote that letter on Wednesday basically saying no, we're not building a backdoor into iOS, full stop. Every tech site on the internet has a hot take on it already and I don't think I have anything new to add to the legal argument. Smarter people than me are covering "should the FBI be able to compel this" way better than I could. What it actually did, though, was make me sit down Sunday afternoon and go through my own devices, because reading that letter made me realize how little I'd actually done to protect my own stuff.\n\nTurns out "I care about privacy" and "I have actually encrypted anything" are two very different sentences.\n\nThe passcode thing first. I was still on a 4-digit passcode. iOS switched the default to 6 digits back in September with iOS 9, but if you upgraded from an older phone it just keeps whatever you had set. Four digits is 10,000 combinations. Six digits is a million. Go to Settings > Touch ID & Passcode, turn off the current passcode, and when it asks you to set a new one tap "Passcode Options." You can go longer than 6 digits too, or switch to alphanumeric if you're the type who wants an actual sentence as a passcode. I didn't go that far. Six digits plus Touch ID for the 90% of unlocks where I'm not typing anything anyway felt like the right tradeoff for me.\n\nThen the backup checkbox nobody looks at. If you back up to iTunes on your Mac or PC, there's a checkbox that says "Encrypt iPhone backup" in the Summary tab. I'd genuinely never clicked it. Without it, an unencrypted local backup just sits on your hard drive readable by anything with file access — no password, no protection, your texts and call history and saved passwords all sitting there in plain files. Click it, set a password (write it down somewhere real, because Apple can't recover it and neither can you if you forget it, ask me how I know from a different app years ago), and it re-encrypts on the next backup. Took maybe four minutes for my backup to redo itself.\n\niCloud backups are encrypted in transit and on Apple's servers by default already, for what it's worth, which is part of why this whole case is messy. Apple already holds keys to a bunch of that data and hands it over with a warrant regularly. The fight is specifically about the on-device stuff and building a tool that could brute-force the passcode. That's the part they're refusing.\n\nIf you're on Android, most phones running Lollipop or newer (5.0+) actually ship encrypted by default now, especially Nexus devices (Google flipped that switch a while back). Worth checking under Settings > Security to confirm "Encryption" says encrypted rather than just sitting there as an option, because on some manufacturer skins it's still opt-in.\n\nMessages were the other thing I fixed. I've had Signal installed for months and basically never used it because none of my friends have it, which is the eternal problem with any of these apps — the encryption is only as good as who else bothers to install it. I texted three people Sunday night convincing them to switch over for anything actually private. Got one yes. That's still progress I guess.\n\nNone of this is a reaction to being personally targeted by anything, to be clear. Nobody's coming for my iPhone. But there's something useful about a big public fight making you actually go do the boring maintenance you'd been meaning to do for a year. I'd bet most people reading this also have that iTunes checkbox unchecked right now. Go check it before you close the tab.\n\nOne thing I keep turning over: a 6-digit passcode is annoying to type forty times a day, and the friction is exactly why people ship with 4 digits or no code at all in the first place. Security that's inconvenient enough gets turned off by real users, not just theoretical ones. That tension isn't going away regardless of how this court case shakes out.\n
The site backups themselves are handled through Tricknowtech at this point, which was one less thing to worry about after a weekend spent checking on everything else.