News Title : Google, Apple can unlock unencrypted mobile devices if asked

News Date : 2015-11-25

-Tribune Desk
Google and Apple will unlock smartphones and tablets when ordered to do so by a court, if the devices are not encrypted, a report Manhattan district attorney’s office revealed. Quoting the report, The Guardian says it details methods for extracting information from smartphones and other Android or iOS devices for law enforcement purposes when the owner does not give permission, explains that Apple can reset a locked phone with physical access to the device and Google can do similar remotely. Apple has enabled encryption by default in September 2014 with iOS 8 should a user set a passcode, which meant that the company could no longer unlock a device and access the data on it without knowing the user’s passcode. According to data from Apple, 67% of Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users are running iOS 9. The situation is different for Google’s Android. It only implemented encryption by default with the latest version Android 6.0 Marshmallow released in October 2015. “Apple’s and Google’s decisions to enable full-disk encryption by default on smartphones means that law enforcement officials can no longer access evidence of crimes stored on smartphones, even though the officials have a search warrant issued by a neutral judge,” said the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Android’s full-disk encryption was implemented with Android 5.0 Lollipop but not enabled by default. Apart from Google’s Nexus 6, full-disk encryption was only optional until Marshmallow came along. Before then, users would have had to choose to enable encryption. According to data from Google, Marshmallow is used by 0.3% of Google Android devices worldwide. The situation also extends to cloud backup services which these companies offer. Should the phone and backed-up data be encrypted, Google and Apple will be unable to access the data without the user’s password, according to the report.

Source