Apple turns off iCloud encryption feature in UK following reported government legal order.
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So despite all the tough talk, they just roll over and capitulate. The only way to protest this is to move your stuff off Apple.
…to less-secure alternatives? Do you really think Google is going to say “no backdoor, we’re keeping encryption, we don’t need YOUR market”?
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…to less-secure alternatives? Do you really think Google is going to say “no backdoor, we’re keeping encryption, we don’t need YOUR market”?
No? Kinda? I'd say a Pixel (so Google hardware, yeah) with Graphene, and either self-hosted, or independent end-to-end encrypted could storage.
There are alternatives to the tech conglomerates.
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Lol. Some galaxy brains were 'Oh my Apple would never roll over and simply do what they're told! They'll keep our data safe!' and mad at me for saying exactly this was going to happen.
Well, huh, look at that. A corporation that rolled over faster than a well-trained golden retriever. Who would have guessed it.
To be fair this is the opposite of rolling over. Rolling over would be adding the back door.
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To be fair this is the opposite of rolling over. Rolling over would be adding the back door.
Yep. This is exactly what I expected them to do. They don’t want the liability of losing your data or enabling your privacy to be compromised on their devices, and the eroded trust of their customer base from that.
Unfortunately the UK put them between a rock and a hard place here. As shitty as it is, I’m glad they opted to remove the feature for only that market, rather than weaken it for everyone. It sucks, but it’s the lesser evil.
I don’t think they had any good choices here. Just like the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, they decided not to make the device’s OS inherently less secure with the inclusion of a backdoor and I can at least appreciate that much.
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So despite all the tough talk, they just roll over and capitulate. The only way to protest this is to move your stuff off Apple.
Apple’s choices here were:
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Do what they did, and remove the feature for the UK only
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Create a backdoor into their OS that can potentially be used by not just governments, but bad actors too, effectively crippling security for every single device they sell worldwide and bypassing the usefulness of on-device encryption entirely.
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Exit the UK market, which is not realistic and would leave millions of UK customers without any further recourse than to replace their Apple devices, which is incredibly wasteful and expensive (not to mention inconvenient).
Apple chose the lesser evil. What more could you possibly expect in this situation? If you want to protest, protest the government demanding that level of surveillance on their citizens.
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No? Kinda? I'd say a Pixel (so Google hardware, yeah) with Graphene, and either self-hosted, or independent end-to-end encrypted could storage.
There are alternatives to the tech conglomerates.
Even your alternative requires someone to give money to a tech conglomerate. There is no perfect alternative this late into capitalism Even if there was, it’s not realistic for millions of Apple devices around the world to suddenly be replaced.
By no means should that discourage anyone reading this from taking action to control your data better, however. I also self-host and am doing everything I can to minimize my reliance on big companies, but there are time, skill and monetary gaps there not everyone can overcome.
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This is why "privacy" doesn't work on a closed system controlled by a third party.
….or a government demanding a way in.
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Even your alternative requires someone to give money to a tech conglomerate. There is no perfect alternative this late into capitalism Even if there was, it’s not realistic for millions of Apple devices around the world to suddenly be replaced.
By no means should that discourage anyone reading this from taking action to control your data better, however. I also self-host and am doing everything I can to minimize my reliance on big companies, but there are time, skill and monetary gaps there not everyone can overcome.
You could swap out the Pixel+Graphene for say a FairPhone+LineageOS. I ran misc-secondhand-phone+LineageOS for over a decade. Still selfhost everything I need. My family have all their photos upload to my nextcloud instance instead of Google.
My switch to Pixel+Graphene is because ultimately the problem is political not technical. A banking app I needed for work refused to run without the real Google services. It also refused Custom ROMs. I tried a lot of tricks. Also GoogleMaps is the only satnav with traffic information in the route planning. There is other things, but Graphene allows you a compromise of running the Google services, but sandboxed.
The problem is not technical, it's political. Most people don't understand the difference between a standard and a monopoly. The law makers are asleep to monopolies and the need for competition in the tech world, so have allow this tech dystopia to happen. Some that are more awake know big monopolies are easier to get things like this story from. Multinational corporation are money machines, they won't really fight for their users. But they miss the bigger picture.
If you care about all this stuff, there is groups like:
Maybe also https://openuk.uk/ , though they more work with big tech.
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…to less-secure alternatives? Do you really think Google is going to say “no backdoor, we’re keeping encryption, we don’t need YOUR market”?
To a more secure alternative, obviously. There are other options than Apple and Google.
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Apple’s choices here were:
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Do what they did, and remove the feature for the UK only
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Create a backdoor into their OS that can potentially be used by not just governments, but bad actors too, effectively crippling security for every single device they sell worldwide and bypassing the usefulness of on-device encryption entirely.
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Exit the UK market, which is not realistic and would leave millions of UK customers without any further recourse than to replace their Apple devices, which is incredibly wasteful and expensive (not to mention inconvenient).
Apple chose the lesser evil. What more could you possibly expect in this situation? If you want to protest, protest the government demanding that level of surveillance on their citizens.
- Artificially pull out of UK, by forcing all UK residents to select a different country of residence with a banner as to why UK residents can't have iPhones, then store all their ADP encrypted data on data warehouses outside of the UK. Then claim that they (Apple) don't track users and have to trust that users are selecting the correct countries of residence, and that they (Apple) will not allow the UK government to peak into non-UK residents, so they can't help "sorry (not sorry)".
Option 4 is similar to option 3 by telling the government to shove it, but with the very important benefit of still allowing the residents to use their products. It's (almost) a win win.
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- Artificially pull out of UK, by forcing all UK residents to select a different country of residence with a banner as to why UK residents can't have iPhones, then store all their ADP encrypted data on data warehouses outside of the UK. Then claim that they (Apple) don't track users and have to trust that users are selecting the correct countries of residence, and that they (Apple) will not allow the UK government to peak into non-UK residents, so they can't help "sorry (not sorry)".
Option 4 is similar to option 3 by telling the government to shove it, but with the very important benefit of still allowing the residents to use their products. It's (almost) a win win.
Also not realistic. Even if the UK government didn’t perceive that as fraud, Apple accounts (and most other businesses’ accounts) are region-locked and cannot be transferred elsewhere to prevent going around laws in this way.
This means that every user would also need to make new Apple accounts in their new country of choice and give up any purchases/subscriptions/data in their UK accounts.
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