From the they-should-have-warned-us dept.:
Yael Grauer reports:
Opening TextEdit in your MacBook to jot down some notes may feel like the digital equivalent of scrawling on the back of an envelope. Unfortunately, those unsaved notes may not be as private as you think they are—and likely haven’t been for a while.
If you’re like the majority of Mac users, you may think your in-progress files—the ones you haven’t explicitly saved—are being stored directly on your hard drive. And with FileVault 2, a full-disk encryption feature included with your OS, Apple has made it easy to encrypt the contents of your entire drive, offering an additional layer of security if your laptop is stolen—especially if you store your own recovery key.
But security researcher Jeffrey Paul recently noticed that Apple’s default autosave is storing in-progress files—the ones you haven’t explicitly saved yet—in the cloud, not on your hard drive. (Surprise!) Unless you decided to hit save before you start typing, or manually changed the default settings, those meeting notes, passwords, and credit card numbers you jotted down in “Untitled 17” are living in iCloud.
Read more on Slate.