FWIW people always put too much trust in E2EE where they didn&#x27;t control either end. This was a loooong time coming.

End-to-end-encryption-except-when-the-UK-government-is-interested doesn&#x27;t have the same ring to it, liable to damage the brand ....

Yes, the parent commenter missed the part where Apple cannot see the encrypted content when ADP is used.

the whole point of ADP is that they cannot provide access

&gt;Providing access when ordered by a court is not as secure so we&#x27;re removing all encryption?Providing a back door for one government reduces the security and privacy of the service worldwide.This decision keeps the security and privacy for the rest of the world. Sucks for the UK that your politicians decided to go this route.

&quot;If we can&#x27;t provide this product legally, we&#x27;re not going to provide it at all&quot; ends up being the only reasonable position in situations like this.At least this way doesn&#x27;t compromise users in other countries.

malicious compliance.Providing access when ordered by a court is not as secure so we&#x27;re removing all encryption?

Don&#x27;t forget the 14-Eyes, which includes most of Western Europe.

If you abhor surveillance, don&#x27;t pick a Five-Eyes nation.

If you&#x27;re after freedom, you absolutely do not want Singapore or Dubai.

Australia is even more everyone-is-a-cop than the UK, and is doing this exact same shit for the exact same reason.

Of the whole list, if the Investigatory Powers Act is what you didn&#x27;t like, I&#x27;d pick Switzerland first, then Belgium&#x2F;Netherlands.Of course, that assumes you&#x27;re fluent in the local languages. Hoe goed spreekt u Nederlands?I made a jump to Germany in 2018, and, thanks to learning a new language, have had a front-row seat to how flat the real Dunning Kruger effect really is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Dunning–Kruger_Effect2.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Dunning–Kruger_Effect2.sv...</a>Dubai, even as an international hub where you may be able to get by with English — لا تضيع وقتك باستخدام دولينجو لتعلم اللغة العربية، لقد حاولت خلال الوباء وما زلت لا أعرف الأبجدية — is much more authoritarian than the UK. Similar for Singapore.If you&#x27;re monolingual, and privacy is your concern, then the US is an improvement over Australia.But also consider Canada and Ireland.Ireland isn&#x27;t in Five Eyes, Canada is, but also Canada is slightly further away from the madness of Trump etc. than any company still inside the USA.I&#x27;m not even sure what&#x27;s going to happen with the US federal government given that DOGE cannot meet its stated goals even by deleting all discretionary-budget federal agencies like the NSA, CIA, FBI, all branches of the armed forces, etc. but on the other hand the private sector is busy doing a huge volume of spying anyway in the name of selling adverts… chaos is impossible to predict, and you should want to predict things at least a few years out if you&#x27;re going to the trouble of relocating.

Depends on what you’re after 
* Australia
* United States
* Singapore
* Dubai
* Europe (Belgium&#x2F;Switzerland&#x2F;Netherlands)

1984 could only ever have been written by an Englishman

Wasn&#x27;t this in line with JD Vance&#x27;s European Eulogy last week, that we shouldn&#x27;t be using 1984 as a playbook?

Ireland might be easy option.UK citizens do not need a visa or residency permit to live and work in Ireland due to the Common Travel Area (CTA) agreement

&gt; Snowden went to Russia.He was stuck in an airport when his passport got cancelled. It&#x27;s not really a free choice if you can&#x27;t go anywhere else, and planes suspected of carrying you get forced to land, even if by virtue of being denied airspace access until they run out of fuel.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Evo_Morales_grounding_incident" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Evo_Morales_grounding_incident</a>

freedom to _what_? Corruption is high, media is pretty restricted under Orban, and it doesn&#x27;t look all that great for freely expressing your identity either. Whether Poland will follow their direction or manage to turn around is still up in the air.You&#x27;re only more &quot;free&quot; there if you have the money to bribe officials.

Snowden didn’t go to Russia because of the government there “valuing personal freedoms,” he went there bevause it is one of the very few major countries that absolutely will not cooperate with any extradition requests from western countries.If you are thinking of going to east europe (and especially Russia) in search of personal freedoms, I got a bridge to sell you (for context, I grew up in Russia). The only “freedom” some of those countries might provide is the freedom from the long reach of the hands of western governments (and even that is a “maybe”, as Andrew Tate has been discovering recently).

Kremlin has full access to every service operating in Russia. If a service is banned in Russia, that&#x27;s a service you should use. If it&#x27;s not banned, it already has a backdoor.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SORM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SORM</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roskomnadzor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roskomnadzor</a>

If you value personal freedoms, you should go to East Europe. The more to the east, the better. Snowden went to Russia.

The fact that it&#x27;s always sucked is precisely why I want to leave.

You do realise that the UK government is, and always has been, notorious for surveillance. They haven&#x27;t changed since before WW2 and probably never will, even if Apple suddenly decides to play hardball with them.And to be very, very honest, if you look across the Five Eyes nations, I don&#x27;t think this is much different from what other countries deal with when it comes to access to data. You had PRISM, the trick of asking other countries for access to their own citizens data to avoid scrutiny, and Apple delaying the implementation of E2E in the US after federal agencies got pissed about it. The list goes on for a long time. At least in the UK, the government is so detached from commoners hurt feelings that they ask for what they want explicitly, with no fear of political consequences.

As someone currently a citizen of the UK, what are my best emigration opportunities?

While Apple especially under Tim Cook has done a lot questionable acquiescences under Cook for political expediences, they really didn’t have a choice here. It was the law.Now going back on Twitter to get in the good graces of President Musk and bringing TikTok back to the AppStore even though it is clearly against the law is different.

If any of the tech firms would resist, it would be Apple.I wasn&#x27;t sure which way they&#x27;d go.

Technically, they are leaving the front door open to all interested parties

But Apple is not giving the UK Government anything they didn&#x27;t already have. Now iCloud encryption will function in the UK just as it has for years (decades?) before the inception of ADP.

They did. They&#x27;ve giving the UK Government a backdoor to all UK users.Apple lost here.

They heavily compete on &quot;privacy&quot; and &quot;security&quot;, so I wouldn&#x27;t expect them to. Additionally, once you start rolling with one government, every one wants you to do something for them while offering you no additional money for the work and weakening of your project.

Not gonna lie, I expected Apple to just kind of roll over and take the blow on this one. Interesting.

If you own an iPhone then nothing can come close to the feature set of iCloud. Apple just have it on lockdown and dont expose the functionality that would be needed for a competitor to take advantage of this.A great time for all people to jump to android IMO and experience the freedom of choice it gives you.

Really disappointed that our government decided to take such a stance.What are people using when self-hosting services in the scope of iCloud nowadays? Nextcloud seems the closest comparable service.

It encrypts your entire phone backups as well

Is that true? Only iCloud can back up an iPhone? They dont provide any way to even extract an encrypted archive so you can keep it safe for yourself?I get more and more amazed at Apples lock in tactics. This is why I own nothing Apple, and have complete control over everything in my digital world.

There is no alternative really as only iCloud can back-up your settings, saved networks, and apps data.Other apps like Nextcloud, can only backup documents (those not in apps) and pictures, because there&#x27;s an API for this.iTunes backup is an option, but it&#x27;s not automatic and convenient.

It’s really not that complicated and none of those options can serve as an adequate backup for iOS devices including app data and meta data.Just back up your phone to your computer via iTunes (Windows) or the built in facility on Macs

I wonder, what are the alternatives now?Tresorit? Self-hosted Nextcloud?

btw, anyone know if this cancels Apple+ Support too? I’ve been resisting switching countries because I don’t want to lose that subscription since you can only subscribe within 60 days of device purchase.

You’ll probably want a method of downloading apps tied to the UK app store though - particularly banking apps.

You need a valid payment method from that country and then cancel all current subscriptions and change to that new country&#x2F;region.

Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong here, and maybe this is too charged for HN, but looking over at you guys from the US:The US has problems (don&#x27;t get me wrong, look at our politics, enough said); but the UK seems to be speedrunning a collapse. The NHS having patients dying in hallways; Rotherham back in the popular mind; a bad economy even by EU standards; a massive talent exodus (as documented even on HN regarding hardware engineers); a military in the news for being too run down to even help Ukraine; and most relevant to this story - the government increasingly acting in every way like it is extremely paranoid of the citizens.Any personal thoughts?

I suppose they don&#x27;t believe certain facts engineers are telling them. With Brexit it was coined &quot;Project Fear&quot;. Now they&#x27;re being told that adding backdoors to an encrypted service almost completely erodes trust in the encryption and, as in the case with Apple here, in the vendor. However, I suppose it is very hard to find objective facts to back this. I&#x27;d guess this is why Apple chose to both completely disable encryption and inform users about the cause.Now we&#x27;re probably just waiting for a law mandating encryption of cloud data. Let&#x27;s see whether Apple will actually leave the UK market altogether or introduce a backdoor.

&gt; Our government is almost schizophrenic in its attitude to encryption.Of course: it&#x27;s not a monolithic entity. It&#x27;s a composite of different parts that have different goals an interests.

In the US, the NSA has always had both missions (protect our country’s data and expose every other country’s data). Since everyone uses the same technology nowadays, that’s a rather hard set of missions to reconcile, and sometimes it looks a little ridiculous. As of fairly recently, they have a special committee that decides how to resolve that conflict for discovered exploits.

I mean, this is no different than one part of the government suggesting running laundry at night to reduce the environmental impact of energy use, while another suggests only running it while awake to reduce fire hazard. Governments and corporations rarely have complete internal alignment.

That&#x27;s because GCHQ knows they can kill if you refuse to decrypt so they have no problem suggesting it to you.

&gt; other than the possibility of leaks of the nation’s most sensitive dataAmusing when you consider the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC, a part of GCHQ), along with the Information Commissioners Office, both publish guidance recommending, and describing how to use, encryption to protect personal and sensitive data.Our government is almost schizophrenic in its attitude to encryption.

They&#x27;ve been sending people to prison for posting memes....

I don&#x27;t know, they&#x27;ve definitely been cracking down on journalists over the past year. Could be an attempt to crack down harder &#x2F; create a chilling effect

You need a non-UK card to use on your Apple Account to change its region.

It&#x27;s for Labour &quot;data analysts&quot; to go through people photos and search for nudes.

&gt; Also is it not possible to set up my Apple account outside of the UK while living here?The ability to turn on Advanced Data Protection does seem to be tied to your iCloud region (as of now I can still turn it on, and I’m in the UK but have an account from overseas).

The UK is arresting people for posting memes. They want full control and that&#x27;s it.

full control on everyone they deem as an opponent. in UK being dimmed and oponent is about posting the wrong meme or even standing in the wrong street at the wrong moment.

As a citizen, I don’t understand what the UK government thinks they are getting here - other than the possibility of leaks of the nation’s most sensitive data.Also is it not possible to set up my Apple account outside of the UK while living here?

The best time to turn on ADP was before this happened. For folks not in the U.K., the second best time is right now. The more people who use it, the more disruptive it will be to turn off.Keep in mind there are some risks with any E2EE service! You’ll need to store a backup key or nominate a backup contact, and there’s a risk you could lose data. Some web-based iCloud services don’t work (there is a mode to reactivate them, with obvious security consequences.) for what it’s worth, I’ve been using it for well over a year (including one dead phone and recovery) and from my perspective it&#x27;s invisible and works perfectly.

Unfortunately, the title says&gt; Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row

Here&#x27;s how:On iPhone or iPad<pre><code> Open the Settings app.

 Tap your name, then tap iCloud.

 Scroll down, tap Advanced Data Protection, then tap Turn on Advanced Data Protection.

 Follow the onscreen instructions to review your recovery methods and enable Advanced Data Protection.
</code></pre>
On Mac<pre><code> Choose Apple menu  &gt; System Settings.

 Click your name, then click iCloud.

 Click Advanced Data Protection, then click Turn On.

 Follow the onscreen instructions to review your recovery methods and enable Advanced Data Protection.</code></pre>

I&#x27;m guessing this is because they haven&#x27;t figured out a way to do it yet. I&#x27;m not very well versed in how these systems work but surely this type of encryption can&#x27;t be disabled by Apple remotely (or they would have that backdoor they don&#x27;t want)?

The article reports that it will be disabled for existing users at a later date.

If you care, then it&#x27;s time to ditch iPhone and Android phones altogether. It&#x27;s not like anything they offer will be safe. You need to invest instead in a FairPhone with e&#x2F;OS or a PinePhone or some similar alternative. Something where you have complete control of the software and ideally the hardware.

I regret immensely not having turned ADP before... Now I&#x27;m feeling really angry at this whole thing.

UK is much smaller than US and they didn’t even fight this ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

Wait, are you saying the U.S. might demand the same? In the current political environment?

When UK demanded a backdoor to e2ee in iMessage, Apple told them they’d rather get out of UK. Why not do the same here? You’re posing a false dichotomy.

That’s a false dichotomy.Another choice, however unpalatable to all parties, would have been for Apple to stop doing business in the UK.

The choice was either eliminate it now (globally, via introduction of a backdoor) or eliminate it in the UK (but keep it globally).So, perhaps this is a bit of a dangerous precedent, but it was the least-bad option.

&gt; abide by the laws and regulations of the countries that they operate in.In this case, the UK is seeking to use local law to change what is allowable on an international basis.That&#x27;s a bit different than a nation controlling the law on their own soil.

It isn&#x27;t really a precedent. Companies, even high-rolling American tech companies, have to abide by the laws and regulations of the countries that they operate in. I guess there is a question of whether this is a legal demand that they truly had to follow, or just a request, and whether they could fight it in court, but Apple seems to be hoping to adjudicate it in the court of public opinion (apparently the initial backdoor request was secret and it got leaked).

China only requires it for their citizens. The UK asked access to any person&#x27;s data in the world.

what do you mean?  other countries have demanded the same, e.g. China.

This can set a dangerous precedent. Now why wouldn’t any country demand the same, basically eliminating Advanced Data Protection everywhere, making user data easily accessible to Apple (and therefore governments)?

Pot, meet kettle!Frankly, our democracies are currently in a rather precarious state.

None of what you just said translates to any European country.None.Executive power is very representative, not direct, with the sole exception imo being Switzerland?

Nothing is happening to it. Governmental overreach, and then if people really want encryption they will vote in privacy-friendly officials. Here in Oregon, USA, we have Ron Wyden, who knows more about netsec than most IT graduates.As long as you can vote there is still civil liberty, just vote for the right people who care about this stuff.

&gt; This was Brexits doing.Not really? We&#x27;ve had horrors like the 2000 RIP[0] well before Brexit. The Blair government made a huge dent in civil liberties and the Tories carried it on.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...</a>

The EU is currently planning exactly the same thing with Chat Control.

This was Brexits doing. As we are no longer EU, we have our own cool rules such as the upcoming PM allowed to watch me take a piss law.

At least we don&#x27;t get to pee in the cup at work

This is specific to each municipality&#x2F;state. The United States federally has no laws regarding the outdoor consumption of alcohol.

The problem is the decline. We had more liberties 10 years ago than we do today.Whether Americans are free or unfree shouldn’t distract us from this.

We can drink alcohol in outdoor public places, can Americans?

The empire is collapsing, so the chairs are being moved aside, the curtain behind the stage is being drawn and the ugly brick wall is being exposed...

I don&#x27;t get what&#x27;s happening to civil liberty in Europe.

&gt; inaccessible by any agency or individual except by the owner?I believe the UK already has &quot;you must unlock anything we ask&quot; as part of the RIP&#x2F;2000[0].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...</a>

Could moves like this by other repressive regimes finally open the door to consumer-owned, consumer-controlled, decentralized cloud storage systems that are fully encrypted and inaccessible by any agency or individual except by the owner?Would be a beautiful thing to see. Not sure how storage would work though since you cannot take payment (that would make it centralized), and storage would have to be distributed, but by who?

The reason is that Apple was never required by UK law to offer any alternative. I think the DSA intended to challenge that, but it would do nothing for UK residents.

What would you recommend as a DIY method?I have a NAS that is accessible through VPN. But I don&#x27;t trust its encryption, thought it is in my controlled location.

As far as I know you can still opt to backup your entire iPhone to a local computer instead of iCloud.You can also manually transfer photos to the computer. Or you can enable a different app (Google Photos or Dropbox for example) to store copies of every picture you take, and then turn off iCloud Photos.Note that neither Google nor Dropbox are E2E encrypted either though.

because Apple privacy is just marketing, they just want you to pay for it, they don&#x27;t really care if it&#x27;s possible to do better for free &#x2F; by others

Why is there only one &quot;iCloud&quot; to backup your iPhone and store photos? Lots of ADP users would use a corporate or self-hosted solution instead.

I can&#x27;t imagine many here (UK) will really care, we&#x27;ve had multiple breeches of privacy imposed on us by the powers that be. - Removed incorrect assumption of this not being reported.

There was a lot of campaigning against the Investigatory Powers bill when it was introduced. It didn&#x27;t help much given the people in power want more power regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.

&gt; let the people pressure the government.Hopefully they will.

I&#x27;m sure shooting at the government would have solved this privacy issue.

Weird. In the US there is a right to bear arms, yet people are also pretty helpless against their oppressing government.

&gt;&gt; In the UK, there&#x27;s no right to bear arms, so people are pretty helpless against their oppressing government.There&#x27;s a right to bear arms in the US and it doesn&#x27;t seem to be helping them with their oppressive government.

Because that’s working so well for the US

Technically I guess you&#x27;re right, but one hopes that the foundations of British democracy provide its citizens with the tools to fight against an oppressive government. The only rub is getting them to stand up and do that.

Small arms are no match for drones and a fully armed military, a successful rebellion by any populace against a first world military is impossible unless the military lays their arms down voluntarily, full stop.

Guns are an inefficient&#x2F;stupid way to kill people anyway.Just ask Russia and Ukraine.Look around, human beings are quite clever.

I just dont interact with the government or British society at all. I have turned my back on it.If they ever come to my door I&#x27;ll either go postal or leave the country.Its so bad here now.

&gt; In the UK, there&#x27;s no right to bear arms, so people are pretty helpless against their oppressing government.When people want to revolt it doesn’t seem like the right to bear arms has much to do with it. Not having the right to bear arms certainly hasn’t stopped countless rebellions and revolutions across the world. It’s not like the French of the Russians had a right to bear arms before their successful revolutions.Even in the UK, the lack of a right to bear arms didn’t stop Cromwell using firearms to defeat Charles II at the Battle of Worcester.

We could try the American way, bear our arms and shoot up a school, but I don&#x27;t see how that will help.

How?In the UK, there&#x27;s no right to bear arms, so people are pretty helpless against their oppressing government.

Those people aren’t enabling ADP to begin with.

Consumers being unable to pressure government, even if true, does not imply this is a bad decision.

NO, it&#x27;s the wrong choice. Most people do not understand this stuff enough to truly care about, and they just want their devices to work. This is an awful decision by Apple. There&#x27;s really nothing consumers can do to pressure the British government.

Given that they’ve only prevented new signups it looks to me more like Apple is trying to apply pressure to the U.K. government to get them to back down. The law that permits this was passed in 2016 so the situation was default lost already.

This is Apple condeeding. Apple lost. UK Government got (almost) what they wanted - a backdoor into iCloud accounts.Apple&#x27;s only consolation prize is that its limited to UK users for now. But it seems inevitable that ADP will gradually be made illegal all around the world.

It&#x27;s the right choice: don&#x27;t bow to government pressure, let the people pressure the government.

Yes, countries lacking in proportional representation and having obscure procedures like proroguing parliament are the best at listening to important but fairly obscure issues from their voters. &lt;&#x2F;s&gt;

It&#x27;s the right decision. Don&#x27;t bow to the government, let the people demand it from their leaders, and vote in new ones.

Very disappointed with this, but I think will be finding alternatives.Family sharing especially of Reminders is a hard one - we use lists for grocery shopping and it is extremely convenient.Has anyone tried out Ente <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ente.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ente.io&#x2F;</a> for photos?

&lt;&lt; Apple can&#x27;t just turn off E2EE on existing account nilly willy.If they are able to, then then can be compelled. Do you mean won&#x27;t&#x2F;wouldn&#x27;t?

This will likely depend on your primary account region.
Apple can&#x27;t just turn off E2EE on existing account nilly willy.

What happens if you&#x27;re an international traveller?

TIL that Apple holds the keys to my iCloud encrypted data!

The only difference is Apple doesn&#x27;t hold the encryption keys when you use ADP.In both cases it&#x27;s encrypted in transit and at rest.

See the &quot;Data categories and encryption&quot; section:&quot;The table below provides more detail on how iCloud protects your data when using standard data protection or Advanced Data Protection.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;102651" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;102651</a>

I&#x27;m confused. I thought iCloud was end-to-end encrypted anyway, and I&#x27;ve never heard of ADP before. Is ADP encryption at rest, whereas normal iCloud storage is only encrypted from the device to the server?

How does this affect me if I travel to the UK with an E2E encrypted IThing?

Removed all my stuff from iCloud about a month ago in preparation for this.

The beginning of the end. A sad day for Brits

I don&#x27;t like Apple, nor do I use any of their products, but as someone from the UK, I do respect them for doing this.Now if only the other companies who said they&#x27;d leave would grow a backbone...

Life is imitating too many dystopian books, movies, etc these days. I think we need to put an end to all creative works before the timeline becomes irrecoverably destroyed.

The real prescient threat in that movie was the predictive AI algorithm that tracked individual behaviors and identified potential threats to the regime. In the movie they had a big airship with guns that would kill them on sight, but a more realistic threat is the AI deciding to feed them individualized propaganda to curtail their behavior. This is the villain&#x27;s plot in Metal Gear Solid 2, which is another great story.This got me thinking about MGS2 again and rewatching the colonel&#x27;s dialogue at the end of the game: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA</a>&gt; Your persona, experiences, triumphs, and defeats are nothing but byproducts. The real objective was ensuring that we could generate and manipulate them.It&#x27;s really brilliant to use a video game to deliver the message of the effectiveness of propaganda. &#x27;Game design&#x27; as a concept is just about manipulation and hijacking dopamine responses. I don&#x27;t think another medium can as effectively demonstrate how systems can manipulate people&#x27;s behavior.

Feels like marvel was onto something with captain america and winter soldier.

&gt; Doesn&#x27;t the US have access to all the data of non US citizens whose data is stored in the US without any oversight?Er, no...? I&#x27;m not sure where you get that idea. Access requires a warrant, and companies are not compelled to build systems which enable them to decrypt all data covered by the warrant.See, for example, the Las Vegas shooter case, where Apple refused to create an iOS build that would bypass iCloud security.

&gt; Doesn&#x27;t the US have access to all the data of non US citizens whose data is stored in the US without any oversight?Totally agree. Having this discussion so US centred just makes us miss the forest for the trees. Apart from data owned by US citizens, my impression is that data stored in the US is fair game for three letter agencies, and I really doubt most companies would spend more than five minutes agreeing with law enforcement if asked for full access to their database on non-US nationals.Also, remember that WhatsApp is the go-to app for communication in most of the world outside the US. And although it&#x27;s end-to-end encrypted, it&#x27;s always nudging you to back up your data to Google or Apple storage. I can&#x27;t think of a better target for US intelligence to get a glimpse of conversations about their targets in real time, without needing to hack each individual phone. If WhatsApp were a Chinese app, this conversation about E2E and backup restrictions would have happened a long time ago. It&#x27;s the same on how TikTok algorithm suddenly had a strong influence on steering public opinion and instead of fixing the game we banned the player.

&gt; But is that backup encrypted? If it&#x27;s not, all they need is &lt;whatever piece of paper a british security official needs, if any&gt; to access your data.Based on them mentioning the difficulty of opting out, I presume OOP does not use Google&#x27;s cloud backup.

Android data isn&#x27;t encrypted at rest (or at least not in a way Google doesn&#x27;t have the key). If the uk gov has a warrant, they can ask Google to provide your Google Drive content. The whole point of this issue is Apple specifically designed ADP so they couldn&#x27;t do that.

&gt; non US citizens whose data is stored in the USThey don&#x27;t even care where it&#x27;s stored...See: CLOUD Act [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CLOUD_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CLOUD_Act</a>

i think people focus on whether backups are encrypted too much. it really doesn&#x27;t matter when the government has remote access equivalent to your live phone when it&#x27;s in an unencrypted state, which they almost certainly do.

&gt; have an Android device beside me that regularly asks me to back my device up to the cloudBut is that backup encrypted? If it&#x27;s not, all they need is &lt;whatever piece of paper a british security official needs, if any&gt; to access your data.This is about having access to backups that are theoretically encrypted with a key Apple doesn&#x27;t have?&gt; We&#x27;re talking about the largest back door I&#x27;ve ever heard of.Doesn&#x27;t the US have access to all the data of non US citizens whose data is stored in the US without any oversight?

That’s literally what the feature they’re removing did.

But if you don&#x27;t trust Apple, how to you get the key into the Secure Enclave to begin with? Doesn&#x27;t Apple control the software on your device that provides the interface into the Secure Enclave from outside of it?

This is why, while I applaud what Apple is doing here, they need to allow us to supply our own E2E encryption keys.

They wouldn&#x27;t even be able to.WA is end-to-end encrypted.

&gt; What concerns me more is that Apple is the only company audibly making a stand.Meta also said they would make a stand if a similar request comes for WhatsApp. I&#x27;m not going to hold my breath though.

&gt; (where you don&#x27;t even have the right to legal advice, or the right to remain silent)A lot is posted about LEO&#x27;s lying in the US, this seems worse.

It&#x27;s amusing to think of Apple as a &quot;monopoly&quot; (if anything they have a monopsony on TSMC production) but let&#x27;s just replace that with &quot;giant&quot; for purposes of discussion.Tech giants typically devolve local operations to small companies to avoid liability - think petroleum suppliers not owning gas stations (because those typically end up as superfund sites). Not sure if this analogy this works for Google Android and all the manufacturers that deploy it for their smartphones too.So corporations have been doing this forever, trying to find legal loopholes where they can have their cake and eat it too.

how much distance between1) tech monopoly strong enough to stand up to G7 nation state demands2) tech monopoly strong enough to remove itself from G7 nation state jurisdiction?edit: s&#x2F;monopoly&#x2F;empire, apologies

Your Android and Microsoft backup aren&#x27;t encrypted.   They are already fair game for a warrant.

There is an upside (if you trust them) -- they&#x27;re pulling a feature rather than adding a back door to it.  Supposedly, anyway.

The government forced them to pull the feature. Would you rather they left a toggle-switch that doesn&#x27;t actually do anything? Or are you thinking they should just pull out of the EU altogether?

It&#x27;s always hilarious to see how far people here are ready to go to twist some bad Apple news into something which might be considered good.I mean seriously. Apple making a stand? What stand? They are ripping security out of their customers hands. Customers which are already dependent on the company&#x27;s decision in their locked in environment.There is absolutely nothing good about it, and you dragging Android into it and making it look like it&#x27;s even worse is suspicious. You can have full control over your Android device. Something impossible on an Apple phone. You can make your Android device safer than your iPhone.

“ They roll over without a peep.”What are you talking about? This is literally them doing the opposite, and there are multiple other public instances of them making a stand, not to mention in the design of their systems.Truly curious how you see this that way.

&quot;Not making a stand&quot; would be leaving everything as is, and handing your encryption keys over to the government. By loudly disabling ADP and saying this feature is illegal in the UK (they really should have said &quot;illegal&quot; instead of &quot;unavailable&quot; so people would know it was the government), they are at least making half a stand. By leaving it enabled in other regions and for visitors from other regions to the UK, they&#x27;re making three quarters of a stand.

&gt; What concerns me more is that Apple is the only company audibly making a stand.They are not making a stand. They roll over without a peep. And this is concerning users&#x27; privacy which they say is the core of the company.Compare it to fighting every government tooth and nail over every single little thing concerning the &quot;we don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s profitable and we don&#x27;t keep meeting records&quot; AppStore

I think that’s the whole point of their push to E2E encrypt as much as possible. Saying they can’t unencrypted something worked for a while.

&gt; There have been many times that Apple have been caught giving user data to governments at their request, lied about it, then later on admitted it once it had leaked from another source.In other words, Apple complies with legal government orders, as they are required to. The government can compel them with a warrant to hand over data that they have, and can prohibit them from talking about it. That&#x27;s the whole reason for the push towards end-to-end encryption and for not collecting any data Apple doesn&#x27;t need to operate the products. This also ties into things like photo landmark identification, where Apple designed it such that they don&#x27;t get any information about the requests and so they don&#x27;t have any information that they could be compelled to hand to the government.

&gt; Apple is the only company audibly making a standApples stand is false, they take with one hand and give with the other. There have been many times that Apple have been caught giving user data to governments at their request, lied about it, then later on admitted it once it had leaked from another source.This whole &#x27;we will never make a backdoor&#x27; is a complete whitewash marketing stunt, why do they need to make a backdoor when they are providing any and all metadata to any government on request.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;06&#x2F;apple-governments-surveil-push-notifications&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;06&#x2F;apple-governments-surve...</a>

Perhaps Apple has a greater leverage in China due to its outsized manufacturing presence. And it&#x27;s likely they already dont offer ADP to Chinese citizens.

China feels like an important difference here though. Google leaving China doesn&#x27;t protect Chinese citizen&#x27;s data any more than Apple turning off ADP in the UK does. As far as I know, Apple isn&#x27;t pretending that the data of Chinese users is encrypted from their government, and the way they&#x27;re complying with the Chinese laws shouldn&#x27;t impact the security of users outside of China.Apple pulling ADP from UK users is similar - the UK has passed an ill-considered law that Apple doesn&#x27;t think it can win a court case over, so they&#x27;re complying in a way that minimally effects the security of people outside the UK. If, as someone outside the UK, I travel to the UK with ADP turned on, my understanding is it won&#x27;t disable itself.Would you have been more satisfied if Apple just pulled out of the UK entirely? Bricked every iPhone ever purchased there? Google doesn&#x27;t seem to have made any stand for security ever - them pulling out of China feels more to do with it meaning they wouldn&#x27;t have had access to Chinese users&#x27; data, which is what they really want.

iCloud in China is operated by a local subsidiary. There is a dedicated screen explaining this when you set up an iCloud account in this region.They adapt to the local rules of each region, much like they’re doing here in the UK.

Eh Google had pretty good reasons to not operate in China (not seeing them in this thread, don&#x27;t recall the details precisely enough to relate here)Apple is deeply embedded in China (manufacturing) and benefits from a decent (but shrinking) userbase in the country. China isn&#x27;t asking for the keys to all iphone user data, just data stored in China.

&gt; Google left China when the government wanted all keys to the citizens data.Google left China after China started hacking into Google&#x27;s servers.&gt; In January, Google said it would no longer cooperate with government censors after hackers based in China stole some of the company’s source code and even broke into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;23&#x2F;technology&#x2F;23google.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;23&#x2F;technology&#x2F;23google.html</a>They were working to reenter the China market on China&#x27;s terms many years later, when Google employees leaked the effort to the press. Google eventually backed down.

It’s different. Apple follows Chinese law to operate their services in China, just like Microsoft.With Google, their services are way broader. Operating a hunk of their search business with a third party Chinese firm just isn’t viable for their services, which are way more complex.

I want to buy my phone from a phone manufacturer.I want to backup my data with a managed service.I do NOT want these to be the same company.The government, with anti trust laws, could easily force this issue. On the other hand, they really love how few places they have to go with FISA warrants to just take anyones data. This is the long tail of the American security state. So it&#x27;s really ironic that China takes most of the blame.

&gt; What concerns me more is that Apple is the only company audibly making a stand.But still Apple operates in China and Google does not. This is weird to me. Google left China when the government wanted all keys to the citizens data. Apple is making a stand when it&#x27;s visible and does not threaten their business too much.Apple is not really in the business of protecting your data, they are just good at marketing and keeping their image.

The US claims the same<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CLOUD_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CLOUD_Act</a>Lots of Americans in this thread seem to be talking down to other countries laws while being completely unaware of their own

&gt; One scenario would be somebody in an airport and security officials are searching your deviceNo Heathrow connection necessary. “The law has extraterritorial powers, meaning UK law enforcement would have been able to access the encrypted iCloud data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including in the US” [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;bc20274f-f352-457c-8f86-32c6d4df8b92" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;bc20274f-f352-457c-8f86-32c6d4df8...</a>

&gt; There&#x27;s no time limit on when you may be searched, so all people who ever travelled through British territory could be searched by officials.&gt; Let that sink in for a moment. We&#x27;re talking about the largest back door I&#x27;ve ever heard of.Codename &#x27;Krasnov&#x27; is the largest backdoor I have ever heard of. And, we only need to look at his behavior.These E2EE from USA can be tainted in so many ways, and FAMAG sits on so much data, that codename &#x27;Krasnov&#x27; can abuse such to target whoever he wants in West. Because everyone you know is or has been in ecosystem of Apple, Google, or Microsoft.Whataboutism! Fair. From my PoV, as European, the UK government is (still) one of the good guys who will protect Europe from adversaries such as those who pwn codename &#x27;Krasnov&#x27;. Such protection may come with a huge price.

&gt; We&#x27;re talking about the largest back door I&#x27;ve ever heard of.Meh, I don&#x27;t know. I can still decide to not go the UK and be fine. I think the CLOUD Act is much worse because it&#x27;s independent from where I am.

Remember that the last fiasco was related to 2FA stores being stored unencrypted on google&#x27;s backup cloud, namely google authenticator.And yes, it&#x27;s still pwnable this way, and happens regularly.Everything in the cloud is not yours anymore, and you should always treat it like that.

My assumption is that Google has keys to everything in its kingdom [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1145669&#x2F;googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1145669&#x2F;googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...</a>

Could that be true and at the same time a &#x27;vulnerability&#x27; exists that megacorp is party to?

Apple&#x27;s ADP is not E2E for only its backups, it&#x27;s E2E for _everything_ in iCloud Drive and a few other iCloud services.

&gt; you think Google didn&#x27;t already sign up to this?My understanding is that Android&#x27;s Google Drive backup has had an E2E encryption option for many years (they blogged about it at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.googleblog.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;google-and-android-have-your-back-by.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.googleblog.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;google-and-android-h...</a>), and that the key is only stored locally in the Titan Security Module.If they are complying with the IPA, wouldn&#x27;t that mean that they must build a mechanism into Android to exfiltrate the key? And wouldn&#x27;t this breach be discoverable by security research, which tends to be much simpler on Android than it is on iOS?

Even more shocking that Germany - my country - leads the leaderboard with over ten times as much requests as the second place.

I imagine they want the ability to look at someone&#x27;s iCloud backups without notifying the owner that they are doing so or they want to do it when the owner is unwilling or unable to provide keys.For the latter, there are a lot of cases where jail isn&#x27;t much a threat (e.g. the person is dead or not in the country).

I don&#x27;t really understand your comment to be honest. Section 3 of the Regulation of Regulatory Powers Act 2000 allows for compelled key disclosure (disclosure of the information sought instead of the key is also possible). Schedule 7 of the Counter-Terrorism Act allows 9 hour detention, questioning and device search at the border. With these powers it isn&#x27;t necessary to get access to iCloud backups, as you can get the device and&#x2F;or the data.I don&#x27;t think the e2e icloud backup is problematic under existing legislation &#x2F; before the TCN. While you can&#x27;t disclose the key because it lives in the secure enclave, you can disclose the information that is requested because you can log into your apple account and retrieve it. IANAL, but I believe this to be sufficient (and refusing would mean jail).The Investigatory Powers Act allows for technical capability notices, and the TCN in this case says (as far as we know) &quot;allow us a method to be able to get the contents of any iCloud backup that is protected by E2EE for any user worldwide&quot;. This means that there is no need to ask the target to disclose information and if implemented as asked, also means that any user worldwide could be a target of the order, even if they&#x27;d never been to the UK.Relevant info:- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openrightsgroup.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000&#x2F;Part_III" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openrightsgroup.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulation_of_Investig...</a>

&quot;technical capability notice&quot; under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA)Sounds a lot like the godawful &quot;assistance and access&quot; laws that were rushed through in Australia a couple of years ago, right down to the name of the secret instrument sent to the entity who gets forced into to building the intercept capability.Now that Apple has caved once, I expect to see other providers strongarmed in the same way, as well as the same move tried in other countries.

When “misinformation” or “hate speech” are illegal, and the government decides what those are, you cannot risk complaining

Irrespective of political leanings, a lot of British people are saying this. They stand for it because they have to. It&#x27;s a government that was voted in by a large margin only six months ago. Disquiet, if that&#x27;s the word, is pretty much universal and I am not sure we&#x27;ve been quite in this position before. Keir Starmer&#x27;s decline in approval ratings &#x27;marks the most substantial post-election fall for any British prime minister in recent history&#x27;.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;politicalpulse.net&#x2F;uk-polls&#x2F;keir-starmer-approval-rating&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;politicalpulse.net&#x2F;uk-polls&#x2F;keir-starmer-approval-ra...</a>

What is going on in the UK? How do they stand for this?

That would not be treason, by a long shot.Treason is the only crime defined in the constitution, and it is quite a high bar.

Treason is a very heavy charge and as far as I know it applies more to individuals. Can a company be prosecuted for treason? I guess it depends on the country and I don&#x27;t know US law well (never even visited there)But I&#x27;m sure local laws conflict heavily between countries yes. I&#x27;m often wondering how multinationals manage to navigate this maze. This is why we have such a big legal department I guess :) And the company I work for is a pretty honest one, I&#x27;ve never seen any skullduggery going on with eg privacy or media manipulation. In fact employees are urged to report such things and I have to do a course on responsible behaviour yearly. Probably a result of being purely B2B. But anyway I digress, just wanted to say that getting away with stuff does not seem to be the reason for us having a big legal dept.But just look at the laws of e.g. the EU and Iran. Pretty diametrically opposed on many topics. There&#x27;s no way to satisfy them both.I think what helps to make this happen is that most countries don&#x27;t try to push their laws outside of their jurisdiction. Which the UK is trying to do here.

Also, I wondered if by complying with British law that they may somehow be breaking laws of another country?Hypothetically, if Apple just provide a back door to the data they have on US Senators for instance, then providing that information may be considered treason by the US.That&#x27;s a totally made up example, and I have no idea, but it seems like it&#x27;s possibly an issue.Which is all about the issues around data sovereignty I suppose!

You have no laws when traveling through immigration. Thats true in US too. There was an article (trying to look for it could be arstechnica verge I dont remember where) once where a US citizen journalist was detained at the border for hours while traveling into the US and questioned. You can be in the immigration for hours or even decades until you give out what they demand which can involve your unlocked phone and password. There are no laws protecting you.

&gt; the largest back door I&#x27;ve ever heard of.Do you know of the clipper chip? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clipper_chip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clipper_chip</a>From what I recall, we were only spared from it by someone hacking it before it was deployed.

And now imagine for a second that the only thing the UK is doing here is getting the same direct access that the US (NSA) has already had for decades.

&gt;&gt; &#x27;Back in the day&#x27; it was the &quot;Right&quot; that wanted have total access&#x2F;total control over everything.It was the Clinton administration that pushed for the Clipper chip.Are you talking about a &#x27;day&#x27; before that time?

If you go too far right or left, both types of authoritarianism are difficult to distinguish. I think this just makes the case that every election you need to be a swing voter, make sure your politicians still overlap with your ideals.Apple today appear to be on the &#x27;correct side of history&#x27;, but even then you need to be swing consumer.

What I fund &#x27;amusing&#x27; is the swap between Left vs Right.&#x27;Back in the day&#x27; it was the &quot;Right&quot; that wanted have total access&#x2F;total control over everything. So people turned a bit &quot;left&quot;. Now the &quot;Left&quot; government is seeking totalitarian-style control (&#x27;because paedophiles&#x2F;drugs&#x2F;etc.).As a reminder, both Right and Left extremes went from &#x27;liberal&#x2F;conservatives&#x27; to &quot;we don&#x27;t need elections ever again - trust me!&quot;.I saw this happening in the US, in Saudi (e.g. Blackberry &#x27;keys&#x27;). Now I see it in the UK. So I interpret this in two ways:
 1) The &quot;Left is the new Right&quot; (or &quot;Right is the new Left&quot;)
 2) Left and Right are irrelevant terms when it comes down to &quot;we need to exert control over people&#x2F;knowledge&#x2F;data&#x2F;information&#x2F;etc. And the &#x27;guise&#x27; of Left&#x2F;Right is just on the fiscal policies. So UK has been playing around with &#x27;snooper charter&#x27; but at &#x27;that&#x27; time Apple&#x27;s encryption was not on the table.Apple (I don&#x27;t blame them - very much - just a little) does what a company does. Makes money. And they prefer to sell-out the data of their clients and keep their money, than lose that money.So... yeah.. if your data is in someone else&#x27;s server, that happens.

&gt; No, it&#x27;s much broader than that. The UK is asking for a backdoor to your data and backups in the cloud, not on your device. Why bother with searching physical devices when they can just issue a secret subpoena to any account they want?My point was that there was already a clear chain in place that would give them access to the data of foreign nationals. It&#x27;s not just a &quot;UK problem&quot;, but actually the ramifications are further reaching.Another thing to consider is that these cookie alerts on sites were for EU countries only, but ended up everywhere. If Apple were to comply, this cloud backdoor could end up in other countries too, with the keys sitting there ready for collection.To make things more complex still, they would need to support dual&#x2F;multi nationality. It probably ends up looking like a dual key E2E system where there is a unique key for the end-user and then a third party. Key revocation would likely be difficult, so it would likely be the cloud provided decrypting and re-encrypting the files per request, throwing E2E out the window entirely.

&gt; One scenario would be somebody in an airport and security officials are searching your device under the Counter Terrorism ActNo, it&#x27;s much broader than that. The UK is asking for a backdoor to your data and backups in the cloud, not on your device. Why bother with searching physical devices when they can just issue a secret subpoena to any account they want?It&#x27;s actually pretty amazing that Apple made ADP possible for the general public. This is the culmination of a major breakthrough in privacy architecture about ten years ago.Traditionally you had to make a choice between end-to-end encryption and data recoverability. If you went with E2EE, it&#x27;s only useful if you use a strong password, but if you forget it then Apple can&#x27;t help you recover your account (no password reset possible). So that was totally unsuitable for precious memories like photos for the average user.Apple&#x27;s first attempt to make this feasible was a recovery key that you print out and stuff in a drawer somewhere. But you might lose this. The trusted contact feature is also not totally reliable either, because chances are it&#x27;s your spouse and they might also lose their device at that same time as you (for example in a house fire).So while recovery keys and trusted contacts help, the solution that really made the breakthrough for ADP was iCloud Keychain Backup. This thing is low-key so cool and kind of rips up the previous assumptions about E2EE.iCloud Keychain Backup makes it possible to recover your data with a simple, weak 6 digit passcode that you are virtually guaranteed never to forget, yet you are also protected from brute force attacks on the server. It is specifically designed to work on &quot;adversarial clouds&quot; that are being actively attacked. This is... sort of not supposed to be possible in the traditional thinking. But they added something called hardware security modules to limit the number of guesses an attacker can make before it wipes your key.And crucially it ensures you don&#x27;t forget this passcode because it&#x27;s your device passcode which the OS keeps in sync with the backup key. This is part of the reason your iPhone asks you to enter your passcode now and then even though your biometrics work just fine.It is a true secret that only you know and can keep in your brain even when your house burns down and nobody (hopefully) can derive from something they can research about you. This didn&#x27;t really exist for the general populace until smartphones came along. And that ultimately was the breakthrough that allowed for changing the conventional wisdom on E2EE.iCloud Keychain Backup came out about a decade ago and it has taken this long to gradually test the feasibility of going 100% E2EE without significantly risking customer data loss. The UK is kind of panicking but when people see how well ADP protects their most personal data from breaches, I think they will demand it. It just wasn&#x27;t practical before.

&gt; What concerns me more is that Apple is the only company audibly making a stand.Dropping the functionality for a particular market hardly equals to making a stand. Sure they haven&#x27;t added a backdoor that would give all user&#x27;s data access to UK icloud user&#x27;s data so in the end UK residents didn&#x27;t win anything.And who knows if they simply have an agreement with US gov to have a backdoor only available to them and not the other govs.

For photos, it&#x27;s probably best to use an open-source (also self-hostable) service like Ente. For files it&#x27;s best to self-host Nextcloud or similar. And rely on other people&#x27;s computers as little as possible. Sadly, operating systems are very complex and mostly composed of proprietary blobs nowadays so there is still a risk of it leaking data but people can still do at least something.

In theory you have the likes of the PinePhone where you can run a full Linux kernel [1]. You could then use something like Waydroid to run Android apps [2].I think the biggest concern is that many of the important apps are anti-emulation, for example banking apps and authentication apps.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pine64.org&#x2F;devices&#x2F;pinephone_pro&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pine64.org&#x2F;devices&#x2F;pinephone_pro&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waydro.id&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waydro.id&#x2F;</a>

Your smartphone cannot be considered a private device. You as the owner don’t have sufficient control over its operating system and applications to ever make that claim.

Too right, it was far more problematic than they ever made out.&gt; The UK government&#x27;s demand came through a &quot;technical capability notice&quot; under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), requiring Apple to create a backdoor that would allow British security officials to access encrypted user data globally. The order would have compromised Apple&#x27;s Advanced Data Protection feature, which provides end-to-end encryption for iCloud data including Photos, Notes, Messages backups, and device backups.One scenario would be somebody in an airport and security officials are searching your device under the Counter Terrorism Act (where you don&#x27;t even have the right to legal advice, or the right to remain silent). You maybe a British person, but you could also be a foreign person moving through the airport. There&#x27;s no time limit on when you may be searched, so all people who ever travelled through British territory could be searched by officials.Let that sink in for a moment. We&#x27;re talking about the largest back door I&#x27;ve ever heard of.What concerns me more is that Apple is the only company audibly making a stand. I have an Android device beside me that regularly asks me to back my device up to the cloud (and make it difficult to opt out), you think Google didn&#x27;t already sign up to this? You think Microsoft didn&#x27;t?Then think for a moment that most 2FA directly goes via a large tech company or to your mobile. We&#x27;re just outright handing over the keys to all of our accounts. Your accounts have never been less protected. The battle is being lost for privacy and security.

Ugh. Is this by App Store country? Anyone know what happens if I already have it configured? I’m actually in US App Store region and sometimes switch to UK… I wonder if that would disable it.

I doubt it would play out like you think.

Could any hackers on here now please hack the fuck out of UK government ministers please?

The UK requested the backdoor for all users, not just UK citizens.

They’re just pulling the feature in the UK. If they put in a back door, they’re pulling the feature for everyone.

&gt;How is that not worse or at least equivalent to a back door?It&#x27;s bad for the citizens of the UK and better for everyone else on the planet with an iPhone. UK citizens should be angry with their government, not Apple.

So instead of building a back door they&#x27;re just completely removing the option to use E2E encryption altogether, thus making everything freely available to government by default?How is that not worse or at least equivalent to a back door?