Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo.amp

by Sure_Tangelo_5148

35 comments

  2. As they should, hopefully, the government will start listening at some point. You can’t add a backdoor to encryption, it’s a massive fucking security risk.

  3. This Labour government is worse than the Tories ever were

  4. This is one of those moves that just feels deeply wrong in your gut

    No one would vote for something like this

  5. Why exactly does the UK govt need this access when other countries don’t? 

  7. Remember peasants; smile and repeat ” it’s for our own good”

  8. This is dangerous and worrying. I wonder if similar pressure will be applied by other authoritarian governments.

  9. Prelude to what about to happen with the online safety act on March 16th.

  10. >It means eventually no UK customer data stored on iCloud – Apple’s cloud storage service – will be encrypted, making it all accessible by Apple and shareable with law enforcement, if they have a warrant.

    And I’m sure no other party will ever be able to figure out how to access that data if they also really wanted to… right?

  11. Is writing to your mp worth it for this, what would I even say lol this is fucked

  12. The problem is that most people in the UK will support this because “terrorism” and they don’t understand the consequences of this action.

    Sadly people in the UK are docile and buy any old nonsense fed to them

  13. So is Google the same with Google Drive or? Surely they’d all be affected, or is it staggered?

  14. I would be honest, I’m slightly uneasy at the ramifications of this.

    People use cloud services like these as tools for backups and ways to store things so they can be accessed across multiple devices easily. There’s stuff that uses would have ease of mind knowing it’s encrypted.

    Users shouldn’t store super sensitive information like bank statements or birth certificate scans or stuff on there. But they do store things like photos, etc.

    So encryption helps protect against any hacks from fraud, identity theft, etc (except where an account is breached because of a weak password, etc)

    There does need to be some form of decryption, subject to a warrant of course, that allows access for police investigations, if a user is suspected of criminal activity (though a user isn’t smart if they’re storing anything incriminating like that online anyway).

    But a blanket decryption of all data is the wrong way to go about this.

    I feel that instead of decrypting the data, in case of a warrant, they could’ve allowed account access to the account (reset username, password, bypass any 2FA or reconfigure it for police access), where they would’ve been able to get the items anyway, but without potentially compromising millions of other users in the process.

  15. They could have just made it so that convicted sex offenders got 2 years for having possession of an apple product.

  16. So they do want to look at my Resident Evil saves? Which one is Sir Kier a fan of?

  17. This is an iCloud feature which quite frankly I think many people did not even have on in the first place because it required storing a key elsewhere.

    I think it’s not the right path to go down, but they’ve obviously done it because evidently iCloud was a secure place to hide a lot of child porn and things of that nature.

    The issue is for the UK gov, bad actors can just find alternatives to use as there are plenty of them. I think it’s an extremely hard issue to fight against because things are becoming a lot more secure now, but to say this will affect iPhone users in the majority is probably not true.

  18. The only vote you have in this world is how you spend your money.. can anyone recommend an alternative to iCloud advanced data protection please?

  19. While this is stupid I seriously doubt many people actually had Advance Data Protection on, if I remember correctly it had some downsides so that it didn’t make sense for “normal” people to turn on anyway.

  20. Here’s a question. What’s worse for the British public, Huawei equipment in our mobile phone masts or our government forcing Apples hand?

    I think at this point I trust China more.

  21. I turned it on when I heard about it a month ago, because I don’t want governments snooping my stuff even if it is random screenshots of fantasy football or dog photos.

    At some point they will want direct access.

  22. Just like that Labour have lost my vote.

    What the fuck are they doing?

  23. Americans already have access to your iPhone – The UK want that same access that the US government gets. 

  24. The UK just descends into becoming more and more like a banana republic…

    What an odious place, corruption at every level, failure of basic infrastructure and the population generally treated like sheep.

    Why any intelligent person would choose to move here is beyond me.

  25. So I presume that the U.K. is issuing these requests now.

    So if you don’t want your data leaked, use open source security apps that you can compile at home which completely defeated the purpose of those.

    Hand guns are illegal yet criminals still have them…

  26. Fresh off JD Vance’s speech the other day. UK is on some weird movements.

  27. They also can’t really stop you as a user encrypting the data with another utility before ever uploading it of course, but it’s still abysmal behavior by the UK.

    I assume they understand that (can’t believe UK intelligence services are unaware of basic mathematics). It’s the “nudge theory” thing I suppose – they don’t want meaningful security as the easy default either, they want UK citizens to have to jump through the extra hoop of using said other utility so things remain insecure and easily surveilled by the UK’s neo-stasi by default.

  28. i dont agree with this, it just doesn’t sit right. Becoming more and more like 1984.

  29. To be clear, this Apple notice is the one we know about.

    Every other major service provider probably has one too (including Google and Meta/WhatsApp) and they have most likely just complied to create a secret back door.

  30. This is going to open a huge can of worms. This is bad for data privacy and protection everywhere in the world and sets the most dangerous, wrong, immoral, unjust and corrupt precedent that any government in the world can access the keys to an individual’s encrypted data with one single warrant.

    Absolutely fucking terrifying.

  31. What does this mean for the average Joe like me? It seems troubling but in not sure how, does this mean all the data in the cloud is at risk from hostile scammers/hackers?

  32. Nothing more reassuring than your government effectively saying that just don’t trust you.

  33. Aaaand there goes any future vote I’d make for Labour. Going to Reform (even though I despise their politics and everything they stand for) because that’s the only thing that will work when it comes to issues like this.

  34. Absolutely disgusting. I’d be interested to know what anyone’s argument would be to supports this?

  35. Isn’t Apple supposed to comply with data protection laws?

Comments are closed.