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)?
Why do pro-privacy tech folks on here act like Apple is some charity? Apple is a business. It won't fight a citizen's fight on your behalf. It is on citizens to use their democratic power to ensure their representatives act as the voting base wants. Apple's goal is to make money. The government is a representation of your will.
> Apple is a business. It won't fight a citizen's fight on your behalf.
Being a business does not remove ethical considerations. And I’m an environment where corporations are considered people, it seems reasonable to expect some degree of alignment with normal citizens.
> Apple's goal is to make money. The government is a representation of your will.
The government is increasingly not a representation of the collective will, and is instead captured by those corporations.
I can’t help but feel the “but they exist to make money” line too often ignores the many ways this is not a sufficiently complex explanation of the situation.
Corporations are people in the legal sense not in any other philosophical way. Just like non-humans proposed for personhood, they are not entities expected to behave ethically. Like a dog, you set rules and apply punishments when they breach it. You don't argue ethics with a dog because they are not relevant to them
People always get this wrong. Corporations are not people. They just have certain rights like owning property. Corporate personhood != full personhood.
lol. It literally does. This is a great example. You believe this is an ethical issue. Other shareholders (you are a shareholder, right?) could disagree and now there is a lawsuit. “Complying with national law” seems like an easy win for them.
Because while a business goal is to make money, it is not necessarily, unlike what you have 80% of the people here believe, to make the most money possible. Ethics can exist in businesses too.
This, plus privacy is in Apple's brand. Without this and other Apple-esque things (lack of bloatware etc.) you may as well get a Samsung for 2/3 price.
I mean they could have tried not complying, and fighting a lawsuit at the ECHR (right of every person to a private life). Takes money and time but more attractive than the other options.
They could pull out of the UK, and to hell with the consequences, but then if the EU decide to do the same thing, or the US, or China says "hold my beer", then the problem becomes much larger.
Losing the UK market wouldn't impact Apple that much - it'd be a hit to the stock, of course, but as a fraction of worldwide business, it isn't that huge. Larger markets would be a bigger issue.
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.
To my knowledge, Apple has always said that their response would be to withdraw affected services rather than break encryption.
> Apple has said planned changes to British surveillance laws could affect iPhone users’ privacy by forcing it to withdraw security features, which could ultimately lead to the closure of services such as FaceTime and iMessage in the UK.
What would that change, effectively, other than have Apple lose money?
The UK would still lose ADP (and then also just Apple products in general). A precedent would still be set.
Your posing a strictly worse third option. Sure, it's an option, I guess. Apple could also just close down globally, as a fourth option. Or sell off to Google as a fifth. But I was trying to present the least-bad option (turn off ADP), rather than an exhaustive list.
Depends on if the US emperor and his cronies have the UK's backs on this issue. If they don't, calling the bluff would work, there's zero chance the UK gov would ban Apple products without US approval. The backlash among the public would be far worse than the TikTok ban. Imagine all companies using Macs. The order of power here is US > Apple > UK.
It isn'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).
That was Apple's interpretation : That to comply with what the UK requested they would have to have the same thing everywhere.
But of course that is nonsense, and Apple could theoretically have a nation-specific backdoor (e.g. for accounts in a given country a separate sequestered decryption key is created and kept in escrow for court order).
I mean, Apple "complied" by disabling ADP just in the UK. They undermined their own "worldwide" claim, as ADP still works everywhere else, and the UK has no access.
The keys are stored only in the Secure Enclave. Encryption and decryption are handled outside the standard CPU and OS. This is hardware-level protection, not just some flag on a cloud account to be flipped. The only way for Apple to break this system is to break it for everyone, since anything else would risk bleed over or insufficient compliance.
I think that's right, and I think the UK will tell them so, and the issue will escalate.
Perhaps, if the UK continues to push, Apple will indeed pull out of the UK, but it'll make it as public as possible and tell the world who it was that forced its hand and what the consequences are - and I don't think the UK government is going to like that result.
IANAL but that's not for any of us to decide. Depending on their initial motivations, the UK might consider this to be enough to rescind the demand for a backdoor. If it's not then Apple will face going to court and in that case they could choose more extreme actions like ceasing business in the UK.
they're non-complient but they made it a lot harder for the UK to fight. by showing that the "backdoor" is disabling the feature, for the UK to pursue this further, the need a judge to rule that the UK has the authority to prevent an American company from providing a feature in America.
> They undermined their own "worldwide" claim, as ADP still works everywhere else, and the UK has no access.
Disagree. There is a difference between ADP being unavailable in one country and it working differently in that country. Implementing a backdoor would mean changing the way ADP works.
