The Intercept just published a very thoughtful critique of some seemingly incongruous marketing claims and actual behavior from Apple. Starting with:

Apple promises that your iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. But according to a document obtained by The Intercept, your blue-bubbled texts do leave behind a log of which phone numbers you are poised to contact and shares this (and other potentially sensitive metadata) with law enforcement when compelled by court order.

But:

The fact that Apple is able and willing to help the government map the communications networks of its users doesn’t necessarily undermine the company’s posturing (and record) as a guardian of privacy, though this leaked document provides more detail about how the iMessages system can be monitored than has been volunteered in the past. Ideally, customers wouldn’t need to read documents marked “For Official Use Only” in order to know what information Apple may or may not disclose to the police.

If we take the Apple vs. the FBI on face value, it suggests that Apple will fight the government when it believes it’s the right thing to do and that it can win. What’s also rather interesting about Apple’s communication services is that FaceTime was supposed to be open source, which would allow independent review of the security of the protocol. Sadly, the FaceTime protocol never came to be open-sourced, arguably because of patent-trolling. It still seems true given this new evidence that Apple cannot handover the content of your messages, but some important metadata instead.