Rene Ritchie on Apple’s iMessage Metadata Logs

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore:

My understanding is that, at some point, Apple’s iMessage engineers decided they needed to keep a metadata log in order to detect and fix problems with iMessage dispatch. […]

Doing dispatch properly is hard, and so engineers did what engineers do, and started collecting data to try and make it better. Because of privacy concerns, though, they only keep that data live for 30 days.

In other words, the logs are there for troubleshooting problems like when you switch a phone number from iOS to Android and iMessage users are still trying to send you iMessages instead of SMS messages.

30 days still seems like a long time to me, but I agree this is not surprising. And even if Apple didn’t keep these logs, they could be required to start keeping them under court order.

★ Wednesday, 28 September 2016