BBC News - Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row
- “In a statement Apple said it was “gravely disappointed” that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers.”
Washington post - Apple yanks encrypted storage in U.K. instead of allowing backdoor access
I guess removing access for the uk is better than backdooring it in silence. But still, not great.
Also, it is interesting comparing compliance on this with complying with the EU on sideloading apps.
Original title: ‘Apple caved and pulled end-to-end encrypted backups in the uk’ - record of bad take title
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Go all the way, remove ALL iPhone services from the UK saying the government will not allow users to have privacy. The government will go back on it within a week.
So what’s Google doing? I assume they’re impacted by the same regulation.
Copy of my comment in c/apple:
Honestly I think this is the right move.
Pull the feature and tell the public that the government won’t permit the public to secure their own data.
“I have security and privacy features for you, but your government won’t let you use them”
Set the public against this overreach.
I think it’s the right move by Apple.
I don’t think it’s the right move by my Government to be ordering this.
Like most governments, the UK’s has a poor record on understanding technical standards (They’re still trying to implement age-restriction on porn sites, something that’s been ongoing for a decade) Backdoor or lack of encryption - both make data security impossible and make the lives of criminals a whole lot easier. We simply cannot have safe data this way.
If your government wants to look, we want to look as well
Apple does not allow other competing security and privacy features. If apple was opening up, the gov couldn’t do anything in the first place
Here in the UK, many typical phone users already assume that their data is shared anyway. Every person that i spoke to about this today asked why I think it’s a problem as they have nothing to hide. A worrying position.
Here’s my response to this line of thinking:
“Would you be okay if I fucked your spouse/partner/etc? No? Why not? You’re already having sex with them. What’s the difference?”
Consent. That’s the difference.
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You’re right. I could never convince my mates. Their typical response “I have nothing to hide, they already have my data”
What if you ask if you can borrow their phone and password for an hour? They have nothing to hide?
😂 they would never do that.
That’s the point isn’t it?
Ask them why they don’t keep their toilet in their living room. 😆
Because it would stink. I get your point but there are better ways of demonstrating it.
That’s not caving. That’s standing up and saying fuck you, your people don’t matter as much as the rest of the world because you’re lunatics.
yea, its a blow to uk user’s privacy & security but not caving. Caving would be implimenting a backdoor. Title was a bit of an annoyed initial reaction, sorry there… maybe best to improve it, i’m not sure?
This is frightening.
They do not have the ability to just remove e2e back-ups in the UK alone and walk away from this, that’s not how the law is written as I understand it.
The snooper’s charter gives the UK government the RIGHT to DEMAND access to encryption keys of any user GLOBALLY. The law is that they can force the cooperation of Apple to decrypt the account of an American user, of a German user, of a Russian user, of a South African user, of a Brazilian user, of a Japanese user who have never stepped foot in the UK.
So they’re claiming that this protects their users, that they haven’t complied but the only way to avoid complying with these secret gag orders for compromising encryption GLOBALLY at the demand of the UK government is to remove themselves entirely from the jurisdiction of the UK. Is to remove all executives and technical personnel from UK soil, to not hire such people who live in or are citizens of the UK as technical personnel as they could be gag ordered and compelled to cooperate. To basically entirely pull out of any presence but maybe storefronts in the UK and take steps to prevent the arrest and pressuring of their executives and key technical people with access from being subject to UK coercion.
That they haven’t done that means all users globally are still at risk. This may be a big PR stunt to convince people they haven’t caved when in fact they have in secret and will hand over data of global users to the UK which shares it via eyes agreements with the US, with France, Australia, etc. This has the added benefit of allowing the UK to keep such access secret by acting annoyed with Apple but not actually pressing any case. If they try and actually prosecute or pressure Apple that’s a sign that they haven’t cooperated globally, if they only offer angry words to the press IMO that’s a sign that in secret they’ve given access globally and only informed UK users that their cloud data isn’t protected.
They are not allowed to just share data from users in other countries where privacy laws exist. It depends a bit on how GDPR is written in the specific country you reside and it it is enough, but generally they should be asking for censent if they try and access it.
Sadly we won’t have any idea when they try and access it, but this is the exact reason why businesses in NL like accounting firms (not bookkeeping firms) need to have their data in datacenter in NL to precent morons like this to access your data.
Pretty sure either Google E2E is non existent or it is alreayd opened up for the UK government or it is being opened in the future. I wonder if Proton is going to need to comply with this.
Pretty sure Apple has a few lawyers
@Strawberry Governments and corporations are powerless to E2EE employed by the users themselves, such as GPG/GnuPG/PGP. What could/will UK gov do against GPG and similar tools, especially those which are open-source and freely available?
I’m rooting for British people to defy their government and create their own pair of public and private keys using GPG/PGP or similar suite (preferably open-source, because they can be easily forked, adapted to easier UX/UI to any end-user, etc), sharing their public keys with each other so they can send enciphered messages, rendering useless such anti-E2EE British law.
When the corporation controls the hardware and the OS it can easily break any encryption running there. Just include key loggers, break RNG entropy, extract keys from memory, or just capture any data before they are encrypted. Or just let the governments into the OS so they can do all that.
British people don’t even know what signal is, and if they do, they will name it a terrorist tool
Oh now that does it, of course local storage is superior!
Gentlemen, set up your
Z3JhcGhlbmVPUw==duress passwordsIn the West, we’re told our system is superior even if it fails to deliver any tangible progress, because we have free speech and privacy. Yet, while people in China flourish as our standard of living continues to decline, turns out the whole free speech argument was hollow all along. Irony, anyone?
You’re mixing correlation and causation. It’s not irony, it’s fallacious thinking. Both may be poor approaches. You’re also only comparing two countries out of all of them. This is just a ridiculous comment.
I’m not mixing anything up. You just wrote meaningless word salad. This is just a ridiculous comment.
Yah I don’t know which is better but I do know China can pick a direction and achieve it. Where the west recently is a floundering fish.
I guarantee the politicians who desperately wanted an end to e2e definitely learned from the communists of the east.
Sees something a capitalist regime does under capitalism, start talking about communism. 🤣
Well, the type of policies like that typically come from one of 2 types of people: communists and fascists.
As much as I hate capitalism, I hate communism even more.
Edit:
Forgot and didn’t notice this was one of the .ml communities. Not gonna continue the conversation because I have the strongest feeling neither of us will argue in good faith.
Bye!
This isn’t caving, is it? This is not making a backdoor.
Arguably it is making a front door / cutting one’s nose to spite the face, but I don’t think it’s caving.
Apple has three realistic options:
- Submit to the UK’s demands and grant them a backdoor to encrypted backups.
- Disable encrypted backups in the UK.
- Leave the UK market entirely.
They went with #2, which is probably the least user-hostile option available.
From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.
Existing users’ access will be disabled at a later date.
I am very interested in seeing what the UX around this will be. Ideally, they should give users direct notice well in advance, so they have time to plan a migration or mitigation. Of course, Apple makes it basically impossible to perform a full backup through any mechanism except iCloud, so…one more example of how vendor lock-in is inherently a security and privacy risk.
:(
WE ARE FUCKED
I’ve got an android
I also have an Android and iPhone. It seems like I’ll have to switch from iCloud to self-hosting.
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A better title would be “Apple helps the US government bypass the 4th amendment”.
