The United Kingdom has issued a secret order to Apple. It wants the corporation to build a backdoor for Britain’s security services that it could use to access the cloud accounts of any iPhone user across the planet.
As first reported by The Washington Post, Britain issued the order in secret last month. The U.K. isn’t looking to root around in a specific account for a specific security reason. No, it wants free access to all a user’s encrypted material, full stop. The U.K is making the demand under a 2016 law called the Investigatory Powers Act, derisively known as the Snooper’s Charter.
As a British person I hope Apple pulls all iCloud services including iMessage and FaceTime, rather than comply with this demand. It’s the only way the public will notice.
If Apple renamed iMessage something like Leaky Communicator or Insecure Texts (Security Breach)
and renamed FaceTime like FaceTime with you and your government…
and then both apps had frequent warnings about data being shared with the government, I wonder how many folks would be willing to go years without ever bothering to do anything to try to fix it.
(btw iOS prompts to contact legislators would go a long way now that I think about it, a la the TikTok thing)
Sorry man, they won’t. Those billions don’t get hoarded in tax havens by themselves.