Apple said users who already had it turned on will be given a period of time to disable it in order to keep using their iCloud accounts, although the length of time was not stated.
I’m in the UK and have ADP enabled but I am yet to be informed by Apple when/if it will be disabled in the future. I’m glad we had a change in government but this is a serious misstep from Labour.
ETA: I’ve written to my local MP to voice my disapproval of this “technical capability notice” and I urge anyone else in the UK to do so as well.
Uhm this is exactly why you only store already-encrypted data on remote servers
Lol. Some galaxy brains were ‘Oh my Apple would never roll over and simply do what they’re told! They’ll keep our data safe!’ and mad at me for saying exactly this was going to happen.
Well, huh, look at that. A corporation that rolled over faster than a well-trained golden retriever. Who would have guessed it.
To be fair this is the opposite of rolling over. Rolling over would be adding the back door.
Yep. This is exactly what I expected them to do. They don’t want the liability of losing your data or enabling your privacy to be compromised on their devices, and the eroded trust of their customer base from that.
Unfortunately the UK put them between a rock and a hard place here. As shitty as it is, I’m glad they opted to remove the feature for only that market, rather than weaken it for everyone. It sucks, but it’s the lesser evil.
I don’t think they had any good choices here. Just like the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, they decided not to make the device’s OS inherently less secure with the inclusion of a backdoor and I can at least appreciate that much.
So despite all the tough talk, they just roll over and capitulate. The only way to protest this is to move your stuff off Apple.
Apple’s choices here were:
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Do what they did, and remove the feature for the UK only
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Create a backdoor into their OS that can potentially be used by not just governments, but bad actors too, effectively crippling security for every single device they sell worldwide and bypassing the usefulness of on-device encryption entirely.
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Exit the UK market, which is not realistic and would leave millions of UK customers without any further recourse than to replace their Apple devices, which is incredibly wasteful and expensive (not to mention inconvenient).
Apple chose the lesser evil. What more could you possibly expect in this situation? If you want to protest, protest the government demanding that level of surveillance on their citizens.
- Artificially pull out of UK, by forcing all UK residents to select a different country of residence with a banner as to why UK residents can’t have iPhones, then store all their ADP encrypted data on data warehouses outside of the UK. Then claim that they (Apple) don’t track users and have to trust that users are selecting the correct countries of residence, and that they (Apple) will not allow the UK government to peak into non-UK residents, so they can’t help “sorry (not sorry)”.
Option 4 is similar to option 3 by telling the government to shove it, but with the very important benefit of still allowing the residents to use their products. It’s (almost) a win win.
Also not realistic. Even if the UK government didn’t perceive that as fraud, Apple accounts (and most other businesses’ accounts) are region-locked and cannot be transferred elsewhere to prevent going around laws in this way.
This means that every user would also need to make new Apple accounts in their new country of choice and give up any purchases/subscriptions/data in their UK accounts. And possibly need new out of country phone numbers and service as well.
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This is why “privacy” doesn’t work on a closed system controlled by a third party.
….or a government demanding a way in.
