So, perhaps this is a bit of a dangerous precedent, but it was the least-bad option.
Another choice, however unpalatable to all parties, would have been for Apple to stop doing business in the UK.
Being a business does not remove ethical considerations. And I’m an environment where corporations are considered people, it seems reasonable to expect some degree of alignment with normal citizens.
> Apple's goal is to make money. The government is a representation of your will.
The government is increasingly not a representation of the collective will, and is instead captured by those corporations.
I can’t help but feel the “but they exist to make money” line too often ignores the many ways this is not a sufficiently complex explanation of the situation.
People always get this wrong. Corporations are not people. They just have certain rights like owning property. Corporate personhood != full personhood.
Because Apple marketing keeps relentlessly bashing their customers skull that privacy is their advantage?
They could also sell the entire business to Google. Why bother with listing options even worse for everyone involved?
This play by Apple applies pressure to the UK government indirectly via its citizens, for free, rather than taking the risk and expenses of a lawsuit.
Apple employes thousands of people in the UK. I really don't see any practical way they could have done that.
They could pull out of the UK, and to hell with the consequences, but then if the EU decide to do the same thing, or the US, or China says "hold my beer", then the problem becomes much larger.
Losing the UK market wouldn't impact Apple that much - it'd be a hit to the stock, of course, but as a fraction of worldwide business, it isn't that huge. Larger markets would be a bigger issue.
This is still better than a back door but it sets an awful precedent.
To my knowledge, Apple has always said that their response would be to withdraw affected services rather than break encryption.
> Apple has said planned changes to British surveillance laws could affect iPhone users’ privacy by forcing it to withdraw security features, which could ultimately lead to the closure of services such as FaceTime and iMessage in the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/20/uk-survei...
IMO they could’ve categorized the whole iCloud service as “affected” and disable all of it.
Users in the UK do still have the option to perform an encrypted backup to their local PC or Mac.
The UK would still lose ADP (and then also just Apple products in general). A precedent would still be set.
Your posing a strictly worse third option. Sure, it's an option, I guess. Apple could also just close down globally, as a fourth option. Or sell off to Google as a fifth. But I was trying to present the least-bad option (turn off ADP), rather than an exhaustive list.
In this case, the UK is seeking to use local law to changes what is allowable on an international basis.
That's a bit different than a nation controlling the law on their own soil.
But of course that is nonsense, and Apple could theoretically have a nation-specific backdoor (e.g. for accounts in a given country a separate sequestered decryption key is created and kept in escrow for court order).
I mean, Apple "complied" by disabling ADP just in the UK. They undermined their own "worldwide" claim, as ADP still works everywhere else, and the UK has no access.
Organizations like the EFF do not agree.
> most concerning, the U.K. is apparently seeking a backdoor into users’ data regardless of where they are or what citizenship they have.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/uks-demands-apple-brea...
Right?
Perhaps, if the UK continues to push, Apple will indeed pull out of the UK, but it'll make it as public as possible and tell the world who it was that forced its hand and what the consequences are - and I don't think the UK government is going to like that result.
Disagree. There is a difference between ADP being unavailable in one country and it working differently in that country. Implementing a backdoor would mean changing the way ADP works.