The Apple-FBI drama may be postponed for now, but that doesn’t mean that Apple is going to sit back and relax when it comes to customer privacy and security.
In fact, following reports that the company will move iCloud partly over to Google’s Cloud Platform, new reports from The Information suggest that Apple has a lot more planned. An initiative called Project McQueen is one of six projects that Apple has started, all of which are devoted to building its own servers and the other networking equipment it needs to be self-sufficient. The report suggests that Apple’s move to Google is anything but permanent. Having its own servers could give Apple significantly more control over the level of security in iCloud and other Web-based services that it operates.
So why is Apple doing this now? According to reports, Apple’s motivation comes from the belief that the servers that it gets from other companies have been “intercepted during shipping, with additional chips and firmware added to them by unknown third parties in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration.” Paranoia or not, it’s nice to see that Apple is willing to go to extreme measures to ensure that user data is safe from prying eyes. Building servers of its own would certainly help Apple prevent snooping through chips mounted on servers.
“At one point, Apple even assigned people to take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there,” said the report.
Of course, in the meantime, the company will still be relying on services from the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon for iCloud. According to the report, Apple is still “years away” from being totally self-sufficient in this regard.
