I remember that case, yeah apple does some good here. I remember 404media running a story about iphones rebooting preventing unlock by police recently( 1 and 2 ).
I guess you/they really don’t want any present established for that.
yea, its a blow to uk user’s privacy & security but not caving. Caving would be implimenting a backdoor.
Title was a bit of an annoyed initial reaction, sorry there…
maybe best to improve it, i’m not sure?
yeah I admit ‘apple caved’ was kinda just a gut reaction ‘apple bad - encrypted backup good’.
If they fully caved we likely wouldn’t have known about it, they’d have just put in a backdoor and given themselves and/or the uk encryption keys.
Denying encrypted backups because of this is probably best.
You could argue apple does have the resources for a a legal battle, but you also can’t really expect them to do that. They’re not liberty or big brother watch.
I doubt that would go well in domestic courts anyway, after that, the ECHR could be sympathetic on proportionallity & art.8 grounds but its a lot of effort.
[BBC News](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo) - Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row
- "In a statement Apple said it was "gravely disappointed" that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers."
[Washington post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/21/apple-yanks-encrypted-storage-uk-instead-allowing-backdoor-access/) - Apple yanks encrypted storage in U.K. instead of allowing backdoor access
I guess removing access for the uk is better than backdooring it in silence. But still, not great.
Also, it is interesting comparing compliance on this with complying with the EU on sideloading apps.
**Original title**: 'Apple caved and pulled end-to-end encrypted backups in the uk' - record of bad take title
…edited but kept a note, it was bugging me.
I remember that case, yeah apple does some good here. I remember 404media running a story about iphones rebooting preventing unlock by police recently( 1 and 2 ). I guess you/they really don’t want any present established for that.