> I am curious what percentage of iPhones have ever, over their usage lifespan, made a data connection over USB.
It's actually a security vulnerability to do so, I'm very cautious to never click trust and I wish there was a setting to disable USB (data) entirely.
When that dialog pops up which asks if you want to "trust" the connected device, saying yes creates a token which is exchanged between the phone and the host and stored on the host. That token has special privileged with iOS and can exfiltrate some data from the phone without user interaction (this has become more and more minimal over the years, with the original iPhone as I recall it could literally take a full backup like from iTunes -- and there wasn't even a prompt on the phone to allow that). That token can also be exfiltrated from your computer and inserted into special boxes made by companies like NSO which have in the past utilize proprietary exploits to basically privilege escalate that minimal access and exfiltrate data from locked iPhones.
I sound like a conspiracy theorist and I should probably just delete this.
It's actually a security vulnerability to do so, I'm very cautious to never click trust and I wish there was a setting to disable USB (data) entirely.
When that dialog pops up which asks if you want to "trust" the connected device, saying yes creates a token which is exchanged between the phone and the host and stored on the host. That token has special privileged with iOS and can exfiltrate some data from the phone without user interaction (this has become more and more minimal over the years, with the original iPhone as I recall it could literally take a full backup like from iTunes -- and there wasn't even a prompt on the phone to allow that). That token can also be exfiltrated from your computer and inserted into special boxes made by companies like NSO which have in the past utilize proprietary exploits to basically privilege escalate that minimal access and exfiltrate data from locked iPhones.
I sound like a conspiracy theorist and I should probably just delete this.