MobileMe suspicious

Apple's latest MobileMe announcement has me elated. In fact, I feel just as I felt when .Mac was first introduced: hopeful, excited and happy at the prospect of being able to rely on Apple for one more thing instead of shopping for vendors all around the Internet.

Of course, this supposes that MobileMe does not follow .Mac's and iTools' infamous path: six months to a year of activity, followed by a long slump, promises to be better, a faux effort to do something about it and, finally, abandon.

This time, however, given the tight integration between MobileMe and the iPhone, Apple's most promising platform from a business standpoint, I am ready to believe things will be different.

The big question, however, remains security. .Mac's security has always been lacking in many atrocious ways. While I am not aware of any instances of .Mac email being hacked or Homepage sites being defaced, iDisk and sync services have long lacked any form of encryption. Anti-virus updates, in the golden age of Virex efficiency, were carried out over a plain HTTP link, leaving Mac OS X users open to a potential plethora of nifty injection attacks. Apple knows all this and seems to consider it normal for user-oriented services.

Now that MobileMe promises to push me contacts and calendars, in addition to syncing my data, will Apple grant us a bit more privacy over the Internet? Without going into the possibilities of wiretapping on physical networks — and we all know how easy that is —, a typical MacBook Air, iPhone or iPod touch user, who is on WiFi or cell networks the very vast majority of the time, would end up spraying around personal information all day long if SSL is not implemented across the board.

Certainly, one is "better off" not putting any confidential data on the Internet. But what about that personal, non-classified kind of data individual users handle every day? Don't we all have doctor appointments, secret rendez-vous and the contact information of a few people the privacy of which we care about in our Address Books?

I've read the MobileMe teaser site and all I could find was a meager mention of the syncing server being "secure." This, however, remains suspiciously vague: we all know the server is secure, since it stands in an Apple-operated data center, behind an Apple-configured router. What, however, about the connections to and from this server?

Am I missing something painfully obvious? Have a skipped a page on Apple.com?

Most importantly, what is your take on the issue?