It's Apple. As long as its users have the perception of security and privacy, they may not change anything.

We have diluted the popular usage terminology so it's meaningless. Everyone ascribes the property "encrypted" to their service but you can't tell from that if they are just storing the key and the data next to each other in the database, or doing the equivalent with extra steps.

The important and hard part in crypto is key management, but that's considered too complicated a concept to explain to users.

From Reolink (all they do here is use a TLS connection):

"Your Privacy Is Our Top Priority Security at the expense of privacy is not what we're committed to. Reolink Cloud collaborates with Amazon Web Services for secure data storage. Also, we use standard AES algorithm for data transmission encryption, use RSA/ECDHE algorithm for secure key exchange, and follow the TLS standards. When you save footage to Cloud or play clips back, your personal information is always kept confidential from beginning to end."

They unfortunately forgot to mention that the encryption is “military grade”. So you probably can’t trust them.

They can't even consider encrypting them, since they are forced to scan for CSAM and the public overwhelmingly rejected on-device scanning. So their server needs access to the images.

Maybe they are, but the gold returned from the sever isn’t.

When they tried to encrypt photos end-to-end much of HN (and others) flipped out and raised such a fuss they gave up.

> When they tried to encrypt photos end-to-end

There is no evidence that iCloud was going to implement end-to-end encryption. This was a rumor that was spread by people who defended Apple's plan to implement on-device CSAM scanning.

> much of HN (and others) flipped out

That must signal some widely-objectionable, obvious implementation error that rubbed common people and engineers the wrong way.

Probably because people lose keys, forget password, and lose their treasured family photos.

That said, the option should at least be available to those who know the benefits and accept the risks.

I think this is one of the biggest unsolved problems with holding private keys. There needs to be some kind of recoverable key system (secret sharing) that is bulletproof and idiot proof. Hopefully something like that is possible!

Yubikey in a lockbox?

> idiot proof

Exactly. My experience is that the universe will just come up with a better fool.

We must not forget that most of us over here have affinity with technology to at least some degree.

We might manage just fine, but it's way above our grandparent's heads.