Press

“The amount of intelligence gathering capability realized by this is astonishing,” said researcher Nicholas Weaver of the International Computer Science Institute, affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley. In particular, emails between Guccifer 2 and the organization believed to be WikiLeaks “suggest that the NSA (U.S. National Security Agency) obtained access to either Guccifer 2’s email account, Wikileaks’ or both.”

"Most people have no idea that this is happening," said Serge Egelman, director of usable security and privacy research at the International Computer Science Institute. Apple's new effort, he said, "gives users more control over how these companies collect information from them."

"You might think that Facebook or the device manufacturer is trustworthy,” said Serge Egelman, a privacy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the security of mobile apps. “But the problem is that as more and more data is collected on the device — and if it can be accessed by apps on the device — it creates serious privacy and security risks."

It's a wake-up call that some experts believe is overdue. “If you want confidential communications, you can't use email period,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, though he believes few people can exploit the vulnerabilities.