Even better security would be to allow users into their own devices. This would mean that critical data just wouldn't leave the device via the network.

(letting users into their own devices means the ability to access the entire device, examine what their device is doing, and firewall it if wanted)

1. iMessage without internet would be tricky. 2. You don’t have to backup in iCloud. Just plug your phone on a Mac or Windows computer with iTunes installed and backup it locally.

That's still not access to the data. That's limited access to data that Apple allows. I remember when Tinder stored their messages in a local unencrypted SQLite database. I wanted to save the conversations between my GF and myself, but I had to get an Android phone and extract the db manually as I couldn't do that with my iPhone at the time.

Here's an overview of how to remove the various layers of encryption (starting from the backup password): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1498342/how-to-decrypt-a...

And how to do it if you want to access the WhatsApp chat database: https://yasoob.me/posts/extracting-whatsapp-messages-from-io...

Also some Go tools to inspect iOS encrypted backups https://github.com/dunhamsteve/ios