This is Apple condeeding. Apple lost. UK Government got (almost) what they wanted - a backdoor into iCloud accounts.
Apple'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.
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.
They have said all existing ADP enabled accounts will be disabled or deleted in time. They need to give people time to migrate their data out before they nuke it.
There was a lot of campaigning against the Investigatory Powers bill when it was introduced. It didn't help much given the people in power want more power regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.
I can't imagine many here (UK) will really care, we've had multiple breeches of privacy imposed on us by the powers that be. - Removed incorrect assumption of this not being reported.
And I guarantee that the reaction from most people will be "good, I have nothing to hide so I have nothing to worry about". The apathy around this stuff in the UK is unbelivable - I've been trying to point out that hey, for years now something like 17 government agencies(including DEFRA - department of agriculture lol) can access your internet browsing history WITHOUT A WARRANT and that's absolutely fine. ISPs are required to keep your browsing history for a year too. Again, nothing to hide, why would I worry about it.
The same is happening Europe-wide too. Everybody always points to the GPDR legislation. You know what is a feature of the GPDR too?
Every European government (even some non-EU ones) can grant any exception to anyone to the GPDR for any reason. And, of course, every last one has granted an exception to the police, to courts, to the secret service, their equivalent of the IRS, and to government health care (which imho is a big problem when we're talking mental health care), and when I say government health care, note that this includes private providers of health care, in other words insurances.
Note: these GPDR exclusions includes denying patients access to their own medical records. So if a hospital lies about "providing you" with mental health treatment (which they are incentivized to do, they get money for that), it can helpfully immediately be used in your divorce. For you yourself, however, it is conveniently impossible to verify if they've done this. Nor can you ask (despite GPDR explicitly granting you this right) to have your medical records just erased.
In other words. GPDR was explicitly created to give people control over their own medical records, and to deny insurance providers and the IRS access. It does the exact opposite.
Exactly the sort of information I would like to hide, exactly the people I would find it critical to hide it from. In other words: GPDR applies pretty much only to US FANG companies ... and no-one else.
So: if you don't pay tax and use that money to pay for a cancer treatment, don't think for a second the GPDR will protect you. If you have cancer and would like to get insured, the insurance companies will know. Etc.
Even though its making the media headlines today, 99% of UK citizens will forget this tomorrow and it will fade into the mists of time. Just like evey other security infringement that any government has imposed on its citizens.
The Mulford Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act), a California gun control act that prohibits open carry, was originally passed back in the 60s to disarm the Black Panthers.
How? the Black Panthers were infiltrated and undermined by COINTELPRO and effectively destroyed from within, meanwhile the white supremacist capitalist system they fought against persists.
Their biggest success as far as I know is starting free school lunches in the US, but that wasn't at gunpoint.
> In the UK, there'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.
Technically I guess you'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.
Like what? Britain is a constitutional monarchy. Its foundations anticipated an oppressive king, not an oppressive parliament. Britain never had a revolution, it never had free speech to begin with. It seems to me that what made Britain successful in the past is maladaptive to its current situation.
The UK seems to be actively covering up the mass rape of little girls and throwing dissidents in prison. They've sustained mass immigration for decades against their own peoples' will. The US just shook off, at least in part, the same mass immigration and the same clamping down of free speech in the US. It's not the only bar, but I would definitely consider it a resounding success. I can't help but think the 1st and 2nd amendment play a part because the 1st is obviously implicated and the 2nd is required to maintain the 1st.
> The UK seems to be actively covering up the mass rape of little girls
They're doing the worst cover up ever given grooming gangs and where they operate have been headlines in the UK for decades.
What they're not very good at is keeping the UK citizens at large well informed with a realistic sense of proportion given the scale of child sexual abuse far exceeds the activities of grooming gangs.
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.
You can pretty easily build / buy these. Look at Ukraine. Lots of their drones were just off the shelf. Jamming is super directional and easy to spot so fighting forces use it sparingly.
Every time this argument comes up, I just feel like rolling eyes, it is so overplayed.
Yes, in a direct confrontation and an all out war, the populace stands no chance against the US military (assuming the military will unwaveringly side against the populace), no argument there.
But an all out war is not an option, the government wouldn’t be trying to pulverize an entire nation and leave a rubble in place. If you completely destroy your populace and your cities in an all-out direct war, you got no country and people left to govern. It is all about subjugation and populace control. You can’t achieve this with air strikes that level whole towns.
Similarly, if the US wanted to “win” in Afganistan by just glassing the whole region and capturing it, that would be rather quick and easy (from a technical perspective, not from the perspective of political consequences that would follow). Turns out, populace control and compliance are way more tricky to achieve than just capturing land. And while having overwhelming firepower and technological advantage helps with that, it isn’t enough.
A first world military that has remotely piloted drones with IR cameras and other surveillance tools will have no problem crushing any form of resistance. They don’t even need to field any troops, they can remotely kill the rebels. How on earth do you wage a rebellion against such a force?
> How on earth do you wage a rebellion against such a force?
I am not an expert, but taliban+al qaeda forces from the Afghanistan war era (that ended in 2021) should be able to provide a solid answer to your question. All I know is that they definitely didn’t make the US give up due to their military tech/firepower advantage, that’s for sure.
The geography of Afghanistan is much different than the United States and fundamentally why Afghanistan is difficult to control, both for invaders and local leaders. It’s called the graveyard of empires for a reason, and that is mostly geographical, and partially cultural.
I roll my eyes when I see this blissfully naive LARP/mallninja imagined scenario, but I do have to remind myself that the US was founded on the basis of forming a milita etc. and I would probably say the same thing if I had that upbringing. You forget that the vast majority of people are stupid and easily scared (this is not a solvable problem)
Help me out - how can policing possibly work if no one is legally required to be policed? You just end up with murderers, rapists etc. expressing their right to "resist" with arms like in spaghetti westerns. It is totally symbolic, and would crumble at the first instance of serious government interest of arresting 'troublemakers', which would of course start with a well crafted PR campaign to get the rest of the public on their side. I think it's naive.
This feels like a strawman because you’re only hypothesizing a situation in which it wouldn’t work well.
Imagine a dark future with a sudden military coup by a small faction of extreme radicals that 85% of the population opposes. could enough citizens rise up and stop them? Could the calculus of being that coup leader be changed by the likelihood that they will be assassinated in short order, by one of millions of potential assassins? Quite possibly. These are not everyday concerns, of course, but the concerns of dark and dangerous times. It’s a bit like buying life insurance: hopefully I never need it.
American police will shoot people dead in the streets with impunity, the military industrial complex engages in constant wars regardless of popular sentiment and the American government is currently being carved up by neo-nazis and oligarchs but you can legally be racist on the internet. I guess it truly is the land of the free.
NO, it'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's really nothing consumers can do to pressure the British government.
Exactly. There is a technological disconnect for a lot of people. They accept actions like this because they don't fully appreciate, IMHO, the ramifications. We do, and we must do more to educate people.
