Two things here. I'm not saying these are necessarily true, but they can be true.

-Apple could be lying.

-Apple could change their corporate policy on providing backdoor access for governments.

In the end, you are trusting a profit-seeking corporation to protect your data and conduct themselves in an ethical and honest way. They also had their phones built in factories where people threw themselves from the rooftop to escape the inhumane conditions. Just saying...

The user manages the keys per https://lemmy.world/comment/25340338

It's literally in the link in the comment this was replying to:

Recovery methods

With Advanced Data Protection turned on, Apple doesn't have the encryption keys needed to help you recover your end-to-end encrypted data. [I do not believe this] If you ever lose access to your account, you’ll need to use one of your account recovery methods — your device passcode or password, your recovery contact, or recovery key — to recover your iCloud data.

Your device passcode or password is the passcode on your iPhone or iPad, or the login password on your Mac that you set to protect your device and enable two-factor authentication. It’s also used to reset your Apple Account password and to recover your end-to-end encrypted data if you lose access to your account.

A recovery contact is a trusted friend or family member who can use their Apple device to help you regain access to your account and data. They won’t have any access to your account, only the ability to give you a code to help you recover your account. Learn more about recovery contacts.

A recovery key is a secret 28-character code that you can use, along with a trusted phone number and an Apple device, to recover your account and data. Learn more about recovery keys.

How would a 'trusted contact' recover keys that are supposedly only stored on your devices, when you yourself have lost those devices; unless Apple has stored those keys elsewhere.

There's also no telling what they've done with your 'recovery key'. Just because they refuse to help you, doesn't mean they have no access; they just won't share that access with you, as it would blatantly expose their illusion.

There's no way in hell I'm trusting a massive US corporation with securing my data without backdoor access. You have no way of managing encryption/recovery keys on an Apple device or seeing where/how they've been stored; you've just got to trust they handle it well for you.

I do not trust Apple; or any large profit driven corporation, particularly one that sucks up to the American government (especially THIS American Government). Not in todays age of dystopian surveillance.

I'm assuming someone is tired here, and it could well be me, but isn't that quite literally what I said? People were saying E2EE doesn't mean the data is secure when it gets there, I was trying to separate the discussion into at rest (secure storage) vs in transit (E2EE) because they're different applications of encryption. I wasn't really intending to argue about Apple's practice's.

From reading, it is encrypted at rest, which sounds like an Apple thing to do. Decrypted at rest feels very Google. Apple state on their standard plan they store the keys in their data centres which I think is what others were talking about? They say they can help recover them so they're accessible in some capacity between the user and Apple.

On their advanced plan details:

Advanced Data Protection for iCloud is an optional setting that offers our highest level of cloud data security. If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, your trusted devices retain sole access to the encryption keys for the majority of your iCloud data, thereby protecting it using end-to-end encryption. Additional data protected includes iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more

ah, yes!