Google’s system was seemingly in the wrong in Mark’s case, and the company’s checks and balances failed as well. (Google permanently deleted his account, including his Google Fi cellular plan, so he lost both his longtime email address and his phone number, along with all the other data he’d stored with Google.) But it’s worth noting that Apple’s proposed fingerprinting system generated several orders of magnitude more controversy than Google’s already-in-place system ever has, simply because Apple’s proposal involved device-side fingerprinting, and Google’s system runs on their servers.

When Messages in iCloud is enabled, iMessage, Apple Messages for Business, text (SMS), and MMS messages are removed from the user’s existing iCloud Backup and are instead stored in an end-to-end encrypted CloudKit container for Messages. The user’s iCloud Backup retains a key to that container. If the user later disables iCloud Backup, that container’s key is rolled, the new key is stored only in iCloud Keychain (inaccessible to Apple and any third parties), and new data written to the container can’t be decrypted with the old container key.