UK demands access to Apple users' encrypted data
28 comments
·February 7, 2025redserk
Longhanks
To what extent is a country's relevance (whatever that even means) the decisive factor in determining what it is allowed to demand?
ben_w
Allowed? UK government can "demand" anything. Anything outside the UK's sovereign control, is necessarily only going to be given by those who have other reasons to do so besides the threat of being arrested by a police force that has no jurisdiction.
The company wants to do business in the UK, it has to follow UK law. UK law claims for itself the right to act globally, and has the power to arrest and fine the companies and officers of Apple that are based in the UK if they don't… but then the Pope claims supremacy over all Catholics* and gets ignored somewhat in this also, and for the same reason:
There are other governments involved, and they don't accept the UK's (/Pope's) jurisdiction exceeds their own.
And in this case, the laws of other nations seem to require Apple to violate this law, so Apple's officers have to decide between which country to risk having arrest their officers, or to leave the UK.
(I have no idea what's going to happen, because the intelligence community in every nation has reasons to want Apple to be forced to do this, so if Apple decides to agree with the UK and violate other nations' privacy laws, those privacy laws may get conveniently ignored).
jonathanstrange
The problem is that I would like to visit the UK as a tourist again as a developer of end-to-end encrypted applications. Geo-blocking all traffic from the UK, not selling to UK citizens, and strictly prohibiting the use of my applications for anyone from the UK should suffice to fulfill the UK's totalitarian demands. Anything else sets a horrible precedent.
Are you ready to fulfill China's and North Korea's requirements as a UK company?
redserk
They can demand whatever they want, it doesn't mean their demands should or will be respected.
The UK only has ~70 million people.
jimkleiber
At some point I hope we get a government that governs global internet interactions. National governments are just making up silly jurisdiction rules because there's a customer that is currently in their place, overlooking the global nature or at least feel of the internet.
If I'm in one country and the person with whom im interacting is in another, whose geographical laws take precedence? Now imagine interacting with many many geographies at the same time.
It doesn't work and I hope one day we at least admit it to ourselves.
bathtub365
You want even more consolidation of power?
tene80i
The U.K. is the sixth largest economy in the world. It’s hardly irrelevant, unless the only relevant countries are the USA and China.
portaouflop
large economy /= relevance
The uk economy is 80% services, mostly financial services and tourism, only 18% come from manufacturing
miohtama
The UK is a poor country with London attached to it
pydry
One of the ways it hangs on is by being a part of 5 eyes "mutual spying club" meaning that US intelligencies can bypass domestic legal protections.
FuriouslyAdrift
That just recently got ruled illegal by a Federal Court...
christkv
If they were to get this it's time to sue Apple for breach of GDPR.
jonplackett
Politicians living in dreamland again about what encryption can and cannot do. I thought this stupidity had died with our last excuse for a government. Sad to see this is back.
sureIy
What do you mean? Do you have the key to your iCloud backups? You do not, your phone does. You know who has root access to your phone? Apple.
It would take a minute to set up some code to fetch the key, if they were legally forced to.
MrScruff
As an Apple user for decades and a UK citizen I would honestly rather they withdrew from the UK market rather than engage with this idiocy.
coldcode
Apple could start with the UK politicians' iCloud backups, I am sure there is a lot of useful compromising information in them. That might cause a change in attitude.
flenserboy
Apple could be the first modern corporation to declare war on a nation-state. They have the resources to set the internet hounds on them & make them absolutely miserable. Looks like the Heinlein/Snowcrash/Stross corporate futures are in play.
krisbolton
Lawfare has some good articles covering the different perspectives on the encryption debate from the last 10 years. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/search-results?prod_search-inde...
miohtama
And then in 90s
mwagstaff
As a UK citizen, I'm hoping this is actually a backdoor effort by the US to hack into people's data rather then something our fine folks were pushing for.
Or at the very least, it's a starting point for negotiations around how best to stop bad actors without compromising user security.
null
draw_down
[dead]
> And withdrawing the product from the UK might not be enough to ensure compliance - the Investigatory Powers Act applies worldwide to any tech firm with a UK market, even if they are not based in Britain.
That's incredibly demanding for a country that's been desperately trying to cling onto relevance for decades.