Conversation

All governments in the world hate end2end encryption - since the time Phil Zimmerman was tried for terrorism and illegal sale of weapons for releasing PGP.

But few governments have been so keen on breaking it at all costs (even of their own reputation) as the UK.

The UK is a country that feels entitled to spy into anyone’s devices, whether they are British citizens or not.

Not happy with passing the abhorrent Online Safety Bill in 2023 (which is technically impossible to enforce, which says that data can remain encrypted but the hosting company still needs to know what the content is about, and which showed the sheer extent of British lawmakers’ ignorance about encryption technology), the British government has decided to go one step further and demand Apple to open a backdoor on iCloud, which would only be accessible to British government officers (sure…), and that would provide them unlimited access to all content created globally (not only by British citizens) on Apple’s cloud.

I bash Apple and its monopolistic practices a lot, I’m proud that I’ve never in my life purchased a single Apple item, but I respect most of their stances when it comes to user privacy (unlike most of the other tech giants).

If they want to stay coherent with those stances, it’d be probably time for them to threaten to pull iCloud services out of the British market.

A company that defends the right to privacy of their users shouldn’t offer a diminished service to the inhabitants of a country just because their government feels entitled to spy on them - let alone erode the privacy for everyone globally just because one single government feels entitled to have decryption keys for everything.

https://www.theverge.com/news/608145/apple-uk-icloud-encrypted-backups-spying-snoopers-charter