As someone who lives in the UK, I hope Apple tell the government where to shove their requests, and that they don't bow down like they did in China. I would prefer a company withdraws from the UK than listens to these over reaching requests of a power hungry government.
If you're hoping for multi-trillion dollar multinationals to fight political battles on your behalf, you're playing the wrong game.
Either your country is a democracy where people get to choose what their government does (aka, a majority of people want these invasive policies), or it's illegitimate and should be treated as such.
The UK isn't a democracy anymore. There are now five parties in England trying to co-exist in an electoral system designed for two. Our democracy is in the process of collapsing under its own weight.
The first past the post system works reasonably well for two parties. But now we have more, it has broken down.
Even with the most advanced statistical methods we now have no idea who would win if an election were to be held tomorrow. Even though we know the % support for each party, the way that it translates to seats is chaotic. Each of the 649 seats is a 3, 4 or 5 way race.
When we had major 3 parties (most of the 20th century) election results could at least be predicted by basic statistical methods, even if they weren't very fair they were at least predictable. Now the results are neither fair nor predictable.
As the smaller parties started to gain ground into the 21st century the polling companies developed increasingly sophisticated and expensive methods such as MRP polling to try to keep up. That worked in the 2024 election but it won't work next time.
Random selection (sortition) could be considered a viable form of democracy if the selection of members is uniform. However the precise way that random selection of members occurs now is that one party can end up with a huge number of seats regardless of their proportion of the vote. That form of random selection isn't democracy.
> Either your country is a democracy where people get to choose what their government does (aka, a majority of people want these invasive policies), or it's illegitimate and should be treated as such.
The US government has previously tried to force Apple to insert a backdoor into its iPhones.
I didn't read the quoted message as saying that Apple won't fight, but that if you need to rely on Apple to fight (especially when you live outside Apple's home country), you've got serious problems.
Agreed. This is the people’s fight with their government, it’s not Apples fight.
The answer is don’t store your data on iCloud. Self host everywhere you can, and protest. Don’t wait for or rely on a corporation to fight your battles against your government for you.
Sadly, the majority of the people want these policies because they’ve been brainwashed or they’re too apathetic to care. The major political parties want it too. Democracy is flawed.
CEOs wont go to jail for their customers, especially when there are billions of customers.
There are only two defences, the law - which is on the governments side or not giving your data to people who fuel their yacht and their jet with customer data.
If Apple did not stay in the Chinese market they will very quickly have a competitor appear in that market that will then threaten other markets. Arguably, there are already Apple competitors in it and Apple's position keeps them from occupying a space that quickly leads to competing with Apple globally.
China is generally viewed as a unique market and capitulating to the Chinese government may lead to capitulation to the US, but not to any other nation as they are incomparable.
The UK market will neither create an Apple competitor nor will it provide enough scope to allow existing competitors to meaningfully grow.
Capitulating to the UK government will lead to many other countries requiring similar capitulations.
So from the selfish Apple perspective, it made perfect sense and Apple did the right thing (for them). From a rights/freedom perspective (for their users), they did the wrong thing, but that's not a battle that they they alone can win.
Out of the 197 countries in the world, how many have governments that respect the privacy rights of their citizens enough to prevent mass surveillance of them? Answer: Zero. Bring on the arguments about the various laws that prevent this, and I'll point you to the "national security and law enforcement exceptions" they they all have, sometimes in the form of "classified" contracts or court orders, and sometimes in the form of "executive orders" or other similar instruments. There are also agreements between the intelligence services of allied countries that facilitate information sharing, so each counterpart can do the collection and analysis of the partner nation and share the results, without technically violating any of their laws.
Sort of like Google designing a censorship friendly search engine for the Chinese market to try to get back into China's good graces?
> The Dragonfly search engine was reportedly designed to link users' phone numbers to their search queries and censor websites such as Wikipedia and those that publish information about freedom of speech, human rights, democracy, religion, and other issues considered sensitive by the Chinese government. It is not designed to notify searchers when the information they want has been censored.
Yes, exactly like that. If the CCP demands a morally base monopolist like Google do that for zero tangible gain, they must be holding Apple over a barrel with backdoors for market access. After all, Apple's competitors in China all acquiesce to Chinese control. Tim's really gotta give the ring lip service if he wants to keep his reputation for supply chain magic.
AOSP at least lets users disable a nosy baseband firmware and uninstall Play Services spyware. Apple customers are fish in a barrel if your rogue government orders an OTA update that compromises your security. Would be pretty nightmarish if you lived in a country like the United States where both companies have already been coerced into shipping backdoors: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
> they must be holding Apple over a barrel with backdoors
Nope.
Apple is subject to the same restriction that every other company in China is.
Or Google in the US, for that matter.
If you store customer data on your server, when the government shows up with a warrant, you have no choice but to hand a copy over.
Handing over a copy of push notifications stored on your server isn't a "backdoor". It's how the law works in the United States when any agency shows up with a warrant.
That's what makes Google's business model of spying on customers as much as possible and hording customer data on their servers so dangerous.
If your state prosecutes women seeking an abortion, for instance, Google handing over data showing you were in an abortion clinic in response to a warrant is harmful.
Contrast with Apple, which operates it's own map service without keeping a log of everywhere you've been on their servers.
> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder
Police had arrested the wrong man based on location data obtained from Google and the fact that a white Honda was spotted at the crime scene. The case against Molina quickly fell apart, and he was released from jail six days later. Prosecutors never pursued charges against Molina, yet the highly publicized arrest cost him his job, his car, and his reputation.
Google spying on people as much as possible and storing everything they glean on their servers (where they have no choice but to hand it over to any government agency with a warrant) is dangerous.
> I hope Apple tell the government where to shove their requests
They complied with the previous request, and stopped because the US government pressured the UK government because they didn't want US nationals to also fall victim to reduced security.
I'd love to see Apple stand up this time, but given their history I don't think it'll happen beyond a miffed comment on a blog somewhere.
If they do it once though, they’ll have to do it everywhere that asks. I hope they can see they’re standing at the top of a very slippery slope.
I also hope our idiotic government starts to go deal with the country’s _actual_ problems sometime soon instead of coming up with pointless / dangerous bs ideas like this + digital ID
They refused to comply, and then publicly announced that they would strip encryption features from UK users before they would add an encryption backdoor.
There's an easy way out of it but most HN users here would hate it. Apple can just donate to Trump and the problem with the British would go away overnight. Downing Street and GCHQ combined cannot match the coffers of Apple and the greenback is the only currency of power that the whitehouse acknowledges.
At the end of the day, the emperor is happy to yank on the leash of the special relationship so long you pay him off.
