Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon.
The technology giant says it could remove services such as FaceTime from the UK over potential changes
This is the correct response. Either everyone has protection or no one has. Not that I'd trust apple anyway but by pulling the service your average person is likely to make some noise because they can feel the effect.
I'm not even an Apple user but somehow I still feel like Apple is one of the very last companies where privacy and the security of your data is more worth than a dime.
Nope, Apple sells your data just as much as Google does: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/apple-ad-revenues-skyrocket-amid-its-privacy-changes https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/22/23513061/apple-iphone-app-store-ads-privacy-antitrust#luMMel
While people noticed their new policies against 3rd party apps, that masked the fact that those policies carved out an exception for first party apps, meaning they collect (anonymous) data on you through Health, Journal, Music, etc. just like every other company. "Trusting them more" is simply a result of you and everyone else getting hit with their privacy ads recently.
Edit: "just like every other company" meant Google and Microsoft, i.e. the other big equivalent tech companies, my fault for not being specific.
They're just jumping on theme. It's what they do. Appeal to trend.
Any company that obfuscates all their security practices, refuses to give statistics on security risks and counter measures, and boils their product security down to "Trust us, bro.", doesn't actually give a fuck about your security. They're just the last company who is still able to keeps everything secret so they can make shit up as they go along. Apple's security is a joke and they're just as bad as any other manufacturer on the market, the only difference is they have successfully kept their shit secret for all these years and spent decades convincing people they actually give a fuck about security.
I still remember a few years ago having a conversation with a coworker about her iphone and she bragged about Apple never being hacked and this was right after I had just got done reading an article about a large scale hack on their network. Of course Apple never said a damned thing about it, so I forwarded her the article. IIRC she mumbled something about how the article was probably not accurate. Apple fanatics do some crazy mental gymnastics to justify them spending thousands on a phone thats probably worth about $300 at best(their hardware is on average 1-2 generations behind other devices on the market).
Did you know that most celebrity phone hacks are thru apple accounts?
I think this is correct response not just in case of morality, but in case of technology. How can you guaranty privacy of a call if the recipient is from UK?
iMessage isn’t a big loss in the UK. FaceTime would be.
WhatsApp pulling out of the UK would have the biggest impact. Almost everyone uses it here.
I wonder how many complaining here actually read even this bland and uninformative article.
At issue I believe (because it is not stated, but discussed elsewhere in better venues) is that UK wants to be able to see inside encrypted comms and files, under the guise of CSAM detection. Apple is right to oppose it.
Arguments based on hypocrisy real or perceived in other venues (china) has nothing to do with this decision its just piss-taking. Give it a rest.
Other than their asinine charging cable/accessory situations I consistently find myself agreeing with Apple pretty much any time any government body or group is mad they won't do something.
They're generally on the wrong side of the battle for right to repair and removable batteries too.
But yeah, privacy they almost always have the right of it.
Requiring usb c was something I agreed with. But indeed many times apple has rightly fought for their userbase.
how do you reckon?
only time they have been on the consumer's side was with regards to privacy, refusing to comply with the FBI and now this.
everything else they are pretty anti-consumer, off the top of my head
Remember how everyone kicked up a giant stink about apple adding "on device CSAM scanning when uploading photos to iCloud"?
They did that precisely because it would allow them to search for CSAM without giving up any privacy. As I said back when all that rage was happening, if apple don't get to implement it this way you can be damn sure that the government is going to force them to implement CSAM scanning in a much more privacy-destroying way, and well here we are.
CSAM, as defined by apple, SPOILER that could be anything, including, and I could rattle off names, anything that threatens the government or those who got their tendrils into it, if we, For example have authoritarians change us to be facist, or re-introduce slavery or segrogation. A mere picture of your bedroom or face could have a somthing in it that allows you to be put into a cohort for later use (legal or not)
so basically apple doesn't want government spyware on their phones
Exactly! Apple wants to make sure the personal data they hand out is directly from them.
There’s legitimate criticism to be made for Apple, but this is something I really appreciate about them.
Walled garden aside, I think they do care about privacy and security.
It's their brand. And I'm glad it is. It's something Samsung can't copy (I presume because of the Google backbone) or attack.
(Written on a Samsung phone btw.)
Edit. I should probably add why it's good even when I'm not in their ecosystem. It raises the bar for competition and shows that privacy adds value.
The incumbent government is circling the drain and are, it seems, determined to leave a trail of destruction and burned bridges for their successors to repair.
Then they can point how useless the government is and get back in power
No offence but isn't a very similar policy about banning end-to-end encryption also in talk in the EU
Absolutely don't agree with it, will be the beginning of the end for privacy but this is more of a European wide (and even world wide) push for a close to e2e encryption
GDPR is basically encrypt your shit and you'll be fine. If they are seriously considering banning encryption the IT sector might as well shut up shop and run for the hills.
It's so bad the UK politicians actually use non MDM unmanaged devices so they can install whichever app they see fit. Tiktok you name it.
We won a physical war via encryption and we'll lose a digital one without it.
I do seem to recall that some countries petitioned a weakening of e2ee. Some other countries through were firmly against it, so it seems it has lead to nowhere. For sure something to be aware of.
There are a lot of things to hate about Apple, but this I can get behind. Get people using 3rd party messaging apps too! Preferably ones with e2e encryption.
Plenty of people in the UK/Europe use third party apps already, iMessage is certainly less of a big deal than it is in the US.
Don't forget canada. So many people here use imessage or whatsapp
For sure. I live in Asia, and the Green vs Blue bubble thing that probably only exists in the US is just so mind boggling to me.
i can recommend signal
Element is on the App Store
God damn bullshit always "for children and terrorists"
I hate how people turn a blind eye to these things nowadays. They're willing to give away their personal lives at the expense of the shittiest excuses out there. Privacy should be a necessity, ffs.
Why don't they just actually give their actual reason: to spy on UK citizens.
To use children and criminals as a scapegoat for this attrocity is disgusting.
"protect the public from criminals, child sex abusers and terrorists"
Aren't two of those just subsets of the first one?
What a curious pair of emotionally manipulative examples to choose, when it adds absolutely no extra meaning to the Home Office's statement.
i would assume they mean 'criminals, especially...', but classic tHiNk oF tHe ChiLdReN argument
Signal and WhatsApp have also said they'd likely leave the UK market if this bill is passed as it currently is.
Signal should still work there if people want to use it, and they don't block it with a Great British Firewall.
It's not so much a matter of whether the service would work or not but whether the corporate directors would be exposed to criminal liability for continuing to provide such services without OFCOM being able to "understand" the encrypted messages: see 99(4) of the Bill
I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.
Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.
What?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
Under Standard Data Protection photos, general drive storage and device back up are not end-to-end encrypted. Meaning that Apple has full access to reading and analyzing them.
Under Advanced Data Protection which is an opt-in feature available since iOS 16.2, you can have those files end-to-end encrypted.
End-to-end encryption makes the user responsible for keeping an encryption key safe, irreversibly losing their data if they lose the key. It's not practical for the general population. I would guess its use is in low single digit percent of apple customers.
And this feature came out in December 2022. A bit over half a year ago. Unless your friend's NDA was super short, I presume the conversation took place before it was released. Either your friend was bullshitting you under an NDA or he's an idiot.
Oh that’s interesting!
Yeah, that conversation is much, much older, pretty close to the very start of iCloud file storage. I’m guessing either things changed since and they used to be end-to-end encrypted, or more likely, what the friend was complaining about is his iCloud infrastructure team didn’t have access to the keys stored by another team, and reverse. So basically, Apple could technically decrypt those files, but they don’t by policy, enforced by org-chart-driven security.
Now excuse me while I go change a setting in my iCloud account… 😳
I don't know anything about this, but the files may be encrypted blobs, but if they are mapped to the original filenames (as is the case with Dropbox) with suffix like jpg, etc, they could assume the type without decoding the file. Not saying there's no difference between Dropbox and Apple, but I'm not sure people expected filenames to be encrypted back in the day (if even now).
Yeah, to be clear, what the friend was saying that day is that they don’t even have access to file names. For them it’s 100% mangled data.
I would definitely consider file names to be personal information, that I would expect to be encrypted. If I store a file named “Letter to IRS for 2020 violation.doc”, then suddenly you know something about me that I probably don’t want you to know.
Don't you know anything, Brits? Apple only strips security features for the Chinese government, you fools!
Haha yeah too right. UK government isn't authoritarian enough for apple to listen to
No, the UK just doesn't have enough population to bargain with.
Take it from me, the British state is just too paralysed by corporate capture and broke to offer any pushback against corporations. They can't even afford to run a properly equipped and staffed police state, let alone enforce any legal proclamations they make against Apple.
It's this publicly known, or just assumed because China blocks everything they can't read?
I assume that Apple gives the Chinese government access somehow, but I've never read details.
Apple proactively aids in censorship and stores all customer data, including encryption keys, on servers controlled by the Chinese government. They've also excluded security features from China and crippled existing features to aid government repression.
The one good thing I can say about apple is that they at least push back against this kind of bullshit, even if they only do so for marketing.
The other side is that they'll also push back against good stuff for the consumer since everything they do is completely out of self interest.
This is the way.
This is the way.
Please no redditisms or else I will literally die of cringe o( ❛ᴗ❛ )o
Those proposals will never be made law and acted upon.
It's infeasible nonsense to pander to the Daily Mail reading curtain-twitchers. They've had 13 years to try and do this. If they wanted to (and indeed if it was in any way possible), they'd have done it already.
It'll be just "Vote for us and we'll make your children safe from nonces and muzzies!" until the end of time.
Eh, I never thought the GOP would actually overturn abortion rights because it's such an effective red herring to get their base to keep voting against their best interests, but here we are.
Nonces and muzzies! Terrifying!
Ribbit
I'll be damned if we'll have to thank the UK for getting RCS normalized.
This has nothing to do with RCS from what I read on the article. It looks like the UK wants to be able to tell companies to disable security features such as End to End Encryption so that they can view the messages.
That would be better than iMessage or Whatsapp, but even better if we all moved to Simplex, or other secure and private messaging app.
Rare Apple W.
Why don't politicians just fuck off?
Nothing they ever do about anything leads to an improvement.
I agreed that they should definitely fuck off, but this will be pushed y the security services. A change of government won’t change the drive for this sort of bollocks.
“Oh but what about the criminals, terrorists and pedos?”
What about all the people that aren’t that who loose their privacy?
I mean, I hate politicians too but they did give us organizations like OSHA that protect us at work. Not all politicians are pieces of shit…but certainly MOST are.
Obvious counter-examples are abundant. I choose the global eradication of smallpox.
That sounds like typical bOtH sIdEs bullshit.
Why can't the UK govt simply rent their spyware from Israel, like everyone else?
They had a different response to China though. Telling.
What did they do in china?
Take your pick: https://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese-government-access-to-its-devices-for-a-security-assessment
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428899/apple-suppliers-china-uyghur-forced-labor-report
Is it? Everyone knows how authoritarian China is. Apple cannot show China as being hypocritical, because they are consistently against privacy...Britain on the other hand: talks one way, and then acts another.
NSA Access Only!
They should just publicly publish all the messages from politicians' accounts.
If they want to see our messages we should be able to see theirs, fair is fair.
The politicians barely even use e2e they use tiktok and all sorts of apps. If they do backdoor e2e it'll be hacked just wait. Matter of time.
I can't believe I'm saying this but...good guy Apple?
Until they buckle and give information to law enforcement again, or that one no fap apocalypse incident with iCloud photos and celebs.
Good on them
As a UK citizen, I totally support this. The more that the average voter is disconvenienced because of proposed law changes like this and the (unenforcable) anti-porn laws, the more likely they are to actually pressure their MP or change how they vote.
Apple is correct. If they compromise their apps here, then other countries will follow suit and their reputation as a brand will take a massive hit. A big part of Apple's appeal is their security, this is the best financial decision.
Apple would have to refactor their tools and potentially introduce security issues for everyone by doing this. If the UK government wants to be fucking dumb, it shouldn’t be something everyone has to pay the price for.
Huh, for once I am siding with Apple. Weird feeling.
And they will come up with other ways to steal user's data, so they could sell it or distinguish user behavior to develop new product.
It's a strange world when Disney and Apple are actually doing the right thing.
People are really quick to give these massive companies credit. Don't be fooled, they aren't doing the right thing for humans or to be good, they're doing the "right thing" to keep their cash cow running.
Same with Disney.
I love this
Yeah yeah. We all know you're too greedy for that Apple. Cut the talk and actually do it if you give a shit about encryption.
Greedy ? They’re both free products?
If you're talking about FaceTime and iMessage... They might technically not cost any money, but if I wanted to use them I'd first have to pay for an overpriced badly designed phone, which means they're debatably free. They're used to enrich the iPhone- just look at the whole blue/green text bubble thing. 'If you don't also have an iPhone you get treated differently' hardly sounds like something a totally 'free' software would include. It just feeds into their 'exclusivity' bubble.
What are the UK proposals?
Backdoor into e2e. So they want to put your shit in hackers hands and the govs. Cunts.
Rare Apple W
Good for Apple to take a stand.
Sure, as long as they check Prince Andrew’s messages first.
Rare Apple w
Fuck I just posted this without realizing someone did it first
Aren’t they the ones that made every website have a cookie notification? So stupid
Apple should remove FaceTime and iMessage from North America, so kids stop getting bullied for green texts, despite having a superior phone.
But seriously, why is the kid with a $200 iPhone 5 with a cracked to shit screen laughing at the kid with a $1200 Android phone with features Apple will "invent" 10 years later? All over a green bubble?
Although, it was pretty nice to be able to see which people are lowlife losers on Tinder back in my dating days. They made it very clear how shitty they were when they bashed me for my green bubbles. Saved me a ton of time!
Although, it was pretty nice to be able to see which people are lowlife losers on Tinder back in my dating days. They made it very clear how shitty they were when they bashed me for my green bubbles. Saved me a ton of time!
jesus, who hurt you?
So Apple users being shitty and I'm the problem? Lol
https://www.androidauthority.com/green-bubble-phenomenon-1021350/
McDonough even admitted that when her ex-boyfriend switched from an iPhone to an Android phone, she felt that was the moment their relationship “started to go downhill.”
this is advertising and should be removed
It's from the BBC?
Face what and iMess who?
