Our iPhones carry our most private photos and secret files and notes inside them – and there’s one step you could do right now to keep their iCloud backups safer from prying eyes. It’s called Advanced Data Protection, and it’s a software option that was rolled out for iOS 16.2 in 2022 for U.S. users that you may not know about, because it’s not a default setting, so you have to turn it on yourself. But you should. This feature “maximises the amount of privacy you can have” on Apple devices, explained David Huerta, senior digital security trainer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. Advanced Data Protection is a strong privacy and security feature because it enables end-to-end encryption for your iCloud backups. When you save your files and photos to the cloud, platforms like Apple, by default, will do “in transit encryption,” meaning transferred data is private but that Apple itself can still see what you are doing. End-to-end encryption goes one step further because it will scramble data so that it’s inaccessible unless there is an encryption key that only you know. It “makes it so that even the platform owners cannot see that activity, those contents being created,” explained David Huerta, senior digital security trainer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. This way, no one –– not even Apple or a U.S. government