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ChatGPT access to Apple Messages is dangerous and irresponsible
(paulfwalsh.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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Not trying to be contrarian or argumentative with this, but apple claims that imessage is end to end encrypted and therefore not readable even by them. Do you have evidence to the contrary? Or am I missing some other aspect?
From the article…
I want to make one technical point absolutely clear because several people have misunderstood my argument:
The encryption still works. OpenAl hasn't cracked or mathematically broken iMessage encryption. An iMessage remains encrypted between endpoints. The privacy problem occurs at the endpoint.
Once the message has been decrypted on the recipient's Mac, that recipient can authorise third party software to access the readable conversation. The encryption worked exactly as designed. It simply can't protect message content from software authorised to access it before or after decryption.
That's what I mean when I say this integration undermines the purpose of end to end encryption.
But it doesn’t undermine the purpose of end to end encryption? End to end encryption means it’s encrypted on one end and is decrypted on the other end, as opposed to being decrypted somewhere in the middle.
This problem doesn’t for anything to undermine end to end encryption at all? With E2EE you still have to trust the other end. If the person who is the other end installs a plugin that reads the texts you send them, that’s not really a technology problem it’s an OpSec problem.
I agree. It definitely does undermine the purpose of E2EE. I just wanted to let it be known that ChatGPT hasn’t actually broken the encryption algo.
Still, fuck Open AI, and any friend who would ever use AI to scan our Signal chats (if such a plugin is ever created) will be immediately cut off from chat comms.
It doesn’t undermine it at all is what I’m saying. The problem is just entirely unrelated to E2EE
It doesn’t break the encryption, you’re right, though insofar as it makes the encryption irrelevant, I’d say it’s being undermined, but that’s just wordplay. The point is, fuck Open AI.
It doesn’t make the encryption irrelevant nor is it undermined in any way.
The person on the other end that you’re choosing to communicate with is the weak link. It has nothing to do with encryption at all. They could do the exact same thing whether encrypted or not. E2EE is simply not a factor here at all
The problem is Apple controls the keys.
You can enable Advanced Data Protection and Apple will no longer store the keys, however this is off by default and for something like an iMessage conversation both users would have to enable it for it to mean anything