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
Apple can claim that they never built backdoor. But talk is cheap without showing the code for people to audit.
In the process of self hosting everything anyways. This just sped things up for me
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.
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.
Pretty sure Apple has a few lawyers
They’re not handing over keys though. They’re just not offering ADP in that region anymore(?) I doubt they would be allowed to hand out keys (which they do not hold) to another government that would compromise American businesses, agencies, etc. The US was already noticing the dangers in this demand and I’m hoping that this was an attempt at a compromise. I guess we’ll never know though, since this included a gag order as well
Still good to keep in mind: not your keys, not your data.
The UK government’s obsession with being a Big Brother is so damn frustrating. A preview of what other governments will try and become in the near future, unfortunately.
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.
“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to say” -Edward Snowden
Wasn’t it something more similar to “saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying that you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say”?
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.
deleted by creator
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?
Exactly why we must shift from privacy to control, power.
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?
Saying “fuck you” would be more like “we’re no longer selling devices in uk and iCloud won’t work anymore”
@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 passwordsApple Caved. I’m no apple fan but what exactly would not caving have been here? Make the backdoor? Pull out of the UK ? Fund an expensive legal battle against the laws of a democratically elected government?
Apple did not cave
caving would’ve been to build the backdoor
End to end encryption is MEANINGLESS if someone else also has a key
They removed a feature in the region to avoid setting a precedent that they would backdoor their feature on the whims of a shitty government
Now Apple gets to tell the UK that they would love to give fully encrypted backups but the UK government does not like encryption and security
I want to say I agree that Apple was put in a Lose Lose here. Building a backdoor would be detrimental, but removing the obstacle does no better. Now other countries can say “well shoot if we just force them to put a backdoor in they’ll just remove the issue entirely”. The main issue that the EU had with e2e is that they lacked the capability of accessing the data, Apple removing e2e in the EU moreorless said “yea sure whatever you can access the data, we just don’t want you to access the rest of the worlds data”
But whats the next step for when the next country (say the US) also decides they want a piece of that action. “Oh let me remove e2e in the US as a whole as well”.
This was an L across the entire board privacy and reputation wise. Apple has set the precedent that they will cave and cater to big brother corporations if it means they can stay in operation in that country. It completely destroyed all the trust that they got from the previous fight vs the US government as a result.
I don’t really know what they could have done differently then fight it though.
yeah I admit ‘apple caved’ was kinda just a gut reaction ‘apple bad - encrypted backup good’.
If they fully caved we likely wouldn’t have known about it, they’d have just put in a backdoor and given themselves and/or the uk encryption keys. Denying encrypted backups because of this is probably best.
You could argue apple does have the resources for a a legal battle, but you also can’t really expect them to do that. They’re not liberty or big brother watch. I doubt that would go well in domestic courts anyway, after that, the ECHR could be sympathetic on proportionallity & art.8 grounds but its a lot of effort.
maybe I should edit the title?
I would leave the title. It’s important that people be critical but willing to adjust opinion.
Apple has fought these in the past (San Bernardino shooting / Phone unlock). It is honestly best for them to never take a case on this issue that they could lose.
kinda horrible to read all these “this big tech company is a rebel and my best friend” comments.
apple allowed this for the usa before many times. this time it had to be publicly announced, cause the orange sleeper agent told them to undermine the uk gov in order to allign the MEGA endeavour.
Curious what happens if you were someone who had opted in to ADP. If your data is fully encrypted, do you just get to keep using it that way? Does this only impact new users? Or, is Apple going to somehow capture users encryption keys and revert ADP?
The BBC article clarifies (not sure if NYT does as well, I can’t read it)
Users will have a grace period to opt out of encryption before their data is deleted. Apple states they do not have the ability to automatically unencrypt the data.
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.
😬😬😬
A better title would be “Apple helps the US government bypass the 4th amendment”.
I know Apple is an American company but what does this have to do with the US?
I agree that I was confused at first, until I remembered that any of the coalition countries (7 eyes?) has access to anything secret, they share with others that don’t.
But then wouldn’t this be “Apple prevents UK and 7 Eyes nations from spying on citizens?”
People in the UK are out of luck but the whole reason they’re turning off encryption there is to prevent governments from having a backdoor into their service.
America can’t legally spy on its own people
The UK can
And the UK is in an intelligence cooperation with America
