Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) announced a series of security and privacy improvements that the company is pitching as a way to help people protect their data from hackers, including one that civil liberty and privacy advocates have long pushed for.
The tech giant will soon allow users to choose to secure more of the data backed up to their iCloud using end-to-end encryption, which means no one but the user will be able to access that information.
Apple said the changes will help users protect their digital lives from hackers.
Companies such as Apple have become an increasingly appealing entity for hackers and law enforcement alike due to the vast amounts of information they hold about people.
Recent years have brought a spike in global cyber attacks and data breaches.
In the first quarter of 2022, there were 404 publicly reported data breaches, up 14% from the same quarter in the previous year, according to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), the Guardian reported.
There was a 68% total increase in data breaches between 2020 and 2021.
The number of law enforcement and government requests for data that Apple has received has also increased, according to the company’s latest transparency report.
Between January and July 2021, the company received more than 12,000 requests for various types of user information, up from more than 10,000 in the last six months of 2020.