The Apple company boasts of the fact that it does not allow the authorities to access the personal data of its customers, but a recent story reveals a completely different situation. We are talking about an American who harassed a journalist of a US publication and who was caught by the authorities with the help of iCloud and the data associated with his Apple ID.
John Rivello is the man's name, he harassed a Newsweek journalist with pictures that caused the latter to have an attack of apoplexy. Based on the journalist's complaint, the police started investigations and found out from Twitter that the man used a fake email address and a prepaid card of the Tracfone operator to access Twitter.
The data from Twitter was obtained based on a court order, but the police could not obtain anything from Tracfone because the MNVO operator did not have customer data. Considering that we are talking about an MNVO, the people from AT&T rented their network for Tracfone and of course they had data about those who accessed their network to surf the Internet.
Twitter provided the police with the IP address used to access the accounts from which the photos were sent, and AT&T supplemented the information with the fact that an iPhone 6 accessed its network with a Tracfone card and had that IP address associated with it. Finding out that an iPhone 6 is involved, the police sent a court order to the Apple company to find out information about the terminal.
Those from Apple associated the IP address with a 5-year-old iCloud account belonging to John Rivello, and from here on things became simple. Analyzing the data from iMessage and the photos from iCloud, the police discovered the man's obsession with the journalist from Newsweek and decided to arrest him, having the necessary evidence to send him to court.
Basically, the story shows how easily someone's identity can be discovered online even if they try to hide, but also how much data can be taken from Apple even though the company says that a lot of information is kept secret.
