Apple CEO Tim Cook CBS / 60 Minutes / YouTube Apple's huge success with services like iTunes, the App Store, and iCloud has a dark side.

Apple hasn't been able to build the all the data centers it needs to run these enormous photo storage and internet services on its own.

And it worries that some of the equipment and cloud services it buys has been compromised by vendors who have agreed to put "back door" technology for government spying, according to a report from The Information's Amir Efrati and Steve Nellis.

Apple has also been using cloud services from its rivals, namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, to help it run these services. And it reportedly just signed a contract to use Google's cloud services as well. Meanwhile, it has embarked on yet another attempt to build more of its own data centers to handle all of that, called Project McQueen, reports Jordan Novet at VentureBeat, and the project is having a rough go of it, reports The Information.

Still, Apple is motivated to design build its own hardware, the same as Google and Amazon does, and run it on its own for one pretty scary reason: security. It suspects that the servers it has been ordering from others are being captured during shipping, and backdoors added to them that will make them susceptible to being hacked.

At one point, the company even had people taking photographs of the motherboards in the computer servers it was using, then mark down exactly what each chip was, to make sure everything was fully understood.

As one person quoted by The Information says, designing and building its own data center hardware is the easiest way to make sure there's no "extracurricular" activity going on.

Apple has made a big deal about the privacy of its products, and even agreed to battle the FBI in court to prevent a court order forcing Apple to write special software to help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple was concerned that that order would set a precedent that would later have forced it to weaken the built-in security on iPhones and other products. The FBI recently asked to cancel the first hearing in the court fight, as it apparently has found a way to unlock the phone without Apple's help.