Apple Pulls Encrypted iCloud Security Feature in UK Amid Government Backdoor Demands

[Patchwork]

Is there any rational explanation why the UK government is demanding the change?

The official reason is to catch criminals whereas the real reason is they can’t use mass surveillance to spy on citizens using encrypted communications like they can through monitoring SMS, which we know from the Snowden leaks they have been doing for some time. I expect they’ll be going after Alphabet and Meta too if they haven’t already.

 

[spartan1967]

Remember when encryption was in it’s infancy stage? Apple said once something has been encrypted by one of our users, we couldn’t unencrypt even if we wanted to.

My how the landscape has changed for Apple ladies & gentlemen. Shows once again nothing is guaranteed except death & taxes.

 

[Aquaporin]

I hope we as a collective of tech users break our habits of using the cloud. It's not free, and often times it is not even convenient. Remember when macOS started communicating all our actions back to the mother ship in the name of safety. Windows does the same thing, by default.

Jeffrey Paul: Your Computer Isn't Yours

It’s here. It happened. Did you notice?

I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.

On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.

It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.

Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings:

Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash


Apple (or anyone else) can, of course, calculate these hashes for common programs: everything in the App Store, the Creative Cloud, Tor Browser, cracking or reverse engineering tools, whatever.

 

[BLUEDOG314]

To protect against foreign terror plots threatening an attack on the homeland....NOPE...To protect against child exploitation and human trafficking....NOPE....To check your group chats for subjectively offensive memes or anyone who speak privately about how they disagree with the government's choice to allow unchecked immigration from parts of the world that are not socially compatible with the West...Ahh thats the one!

 

[turbineseaplane]

Whilst I don’t agree with the government at all and hope they go back on this I would imagine the majority of users (not those on Macrumors) don’t even have ADP activated. Having just asked 10 people in my office (of various ages) most didn’t even know what it was. Only one person had it activated.

Even I don’t have it activated as although I have the latest iPhone and iPad, due to not having an up to date Mac and not wanting to remove it from my Apple account, I can’t activate it anyway.

Of course, this doesn’t justify the governments behaviour whatsoever.

I'm not in the UK, but I can concur on ADP activation among my peers.
None of them have it on, nor do I

For me it's because I have older devices that I still use that can't do ADP on their iOS version

 

[scgf]

I'm in the UK and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I wasn't even aware of ADP. Nobody I know is aware of it either. What sort of things are people doing that they feel they need such security?

 

[horsebattery]

Reporters are missing something with this story. If Apple had been asked to compromise encryption globally, pulling ADP from only the UK doesn't accomplish that at all. And even without ADP, Apple services are still E2EE. So should UK users regard this move as confirmation that Apple is complying with mass surveillance of UK users?

Without ADP, whatever you store in iCloud does NOT have end to end encryption enabled. That was the point of the feature, and the reason for the UK’s request.

I don’t know what you’re referring to as “Apple services”, but this whole endeavor has been specifically for the iCloud offering.

 

[xraydoc]

Waiting for this to happen in the US as well.

 

[mimeArtist]

When it says 'new users' does that mean existing user are fine? Don't quite get that bit... if I don't turn it off am I removed?

 

[Fuchal]

Remember when encryption was in it’s infancy stage? Apple said once something has been encrypted by one of our users, we couldn’t unencrypt even if we wanted to.

My how the landscape has changed for Apple ladies & gentlemen. Shows once again nothing is guaranteed except death & taxes.

They can't unencrypt it. That's why they're making the user do it by force.

 

[horsebattery]

I'm in the UK and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I wasn't even aware of ADP. Nobody I know is aware of it either. What sort of things are people doing that they feel they need such security?

Nothing to hide argument - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[DougieS]

I'm in the UK and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I wasn't even aware of ADP. Nobody I know is aware of it either. What sort of things are people doing that they feel they need such security?

Because our data is our data..

 

[Adamj53]

As a UK Apple user I am not happy about this at all. Not that I have anything to hide, but its the principle. We have a dictatorship government at the moment.

 

[TheOldChevy]

Moscow/MarALago: 1, Europe/Democracy: 0
(even if this one comes from UK)

 

[cjsuk]

I've removed all my data from iCloud.

I will stop paying for it next month.

 

[PsykX]

Woah... This is big !

Apple could as well NOT do that and pay whatever the UK fines them. But it would also open the door for other governments to get some easy money from Apple.

But I think no matter how bad this is, it makes sense that Apple complies. It's a law.
And by doing that to its users, I hope the mass population pressures the UK government to step back.

 

[now i see it]

I guess no door at all is better than a sort of secret backdoor. At least people will know that their iCloud data is open to anyone with a warrant now in the UK as was always the case

 

[ItWasNotMe]

Apple should take out lots of ads to make sure people know why this happened.

Run a Herr Starmer campaign, even.

They can't. Even to say they were asked to do this is illegal.

 

[DrJR]

Local backup on your laptop faster to restore from anyway

Right? Just partition part of the disk for backup and problems solved. Whole separate disk so you don't waste space.

 

[Madhatter32]

What is it about individual freedom and the right to privacy that the United Kingdom hates so much? The ECP -- the English Communist Party -- has gone off the rails.

 

[NMBob]

Soooo you mean the accounts of government officials are now also not protected? Huh.

 

[GMShadow]

They can't. Even to say they were asked to do this is illegal.

Make them prosecute. The UK relationship with the US is already on the downswing - I highly doubt they want to push things to losing Trident and more. Call their bluff.

 

[Roadster Lewis]

I’m not happy about this - the government want to be able to spy on a few bad actors, but are weakening security for everyone else.

The real criminals etc will move to a separate service which dies have end to end encryption.

 

[t0pher]

What does this mean for existing users then?

Will their data be unencrypted?

“Customers who are already using Advanced Data Protection, or ADP, will need to manually disable it during an unspecified grace period to keep their iCloud accounts, according to the report. Apple said it will issue additional guidance in the future to affected users and that it "does not have the ability to automatically disable it on their behalf."

 

[USB-Adapter]

This would be a good case for the EU to challenge Apple's (and Google's) monopoly on integrated cloud services on their mobile phones.

You can use third-party cloud services somehow, but you can't integrate them transparently into the operating system. You can't save backups on it. To synchronise any app data with it, the app has to explicitly support the given cloud service instead of just storing it on the device and synchronising the data in the background, as is possible with iCloud and Google Drive, but not with third-party cloud services.

I would like to have OwnCloud instead of Apple/Google Cloud, so that I have full control over my data, so that backups are also stored on my NAS at home, so that I can also have 10 TB of storage space etc.

And if I back up my data on my own server, neither the UK nor the US nor Elon Musk himself can access my data, at least as long as the US/Russian united forces have not yet occupied my city.