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 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.
Can confirm, it had swipe to reply for a while now, it’s coming to iMessage in next iOS… The only thing that annoys me about WhatsApp is the high picture compression resulting in low quality images.
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.
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
- first to remove jack 3.5 (even though I don’t really care about this, others do.)
- sticking to shitty lightning cable so they can sell overpriced cables
- the charger thing with the EU
- worst of all entirely against right to repair
To be fair, those first three points fall squarely under that “charging cable/accessory situations” exception. With Apple, it turns out that’s a pretty broad exception.
Boo hoo about the headphone jack. People are still pissed about this? Please
Requiring usb c was something I agreed with. But indeed many times apple has rightly fought for their userbase.
so basically apple doesn’t want government spyware on their phones
There’s legitimate criticism to be made for Apple, but this is something I really appreciate about them.
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.
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.
This is the way.
Please no redditisms or else I will literally die of cringe o( ❛ᴗ❛ )o
This is more like internet culture tho?
I know I just find it to be such a manufactured corporate tagline that exists to be used in this way and it rubs me the wrong way
I can see what you mean, though I still find it just harmless humor
No fair enough it just rubs me the wrong way haha
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Lol I’m very aware
Then perish
19.7 million UK iPhone users will care about this.
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Until cross platform messaging is a good as iMessage and FaceTime from an iPhones user’s perspective it’s going to be bad.
I have only ever used an iPhone (ignore non-smart phones) and have been weaned entirely on Apples stock apps. Conversely almost everyone I communicate regularly with is also an iPhone users. I do use other platform for communicating with non-apple friends but the experience is significantly poorer.
I couldn’t say how many people existed within this almost exclusively Apple ecosystem but I would hazard a guess that there are a few.
Not in the UK.
Feel free to insert the equally stupidly large number of iPhone users for your particular geographic location.
Wut?
Jesus. Never mind.
So, do I have to behave the way you like to be here? That’s nonsense.
My tenets are:
- no one will post on lemmy.world without getting prior approval from me
- At a minimum every second comment should end in some sort of praise of me
- No posting on Thursdays
- You accidentally posted something I didn’t like? Tough shit your wife and family are now hostage
Please take care of my wife and kids. And don’t feed them after midnight
Yes didn’t you get my handout?
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Gatekeeping, another redditism. Perhaps you belong there after all?
Damnit I agree with both comments but I think the first part of your comment is the most lemmish
It’s from Star wars…
Did Reddit make the Mandalorian? 😱
This is the way.
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.
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
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
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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.
as is the way with all companies
Your gonna have to back up that sort of statement. I’m not an apple fanboy, but I take security and privacy seriously, and they seem to really be on the consumers side in that regard. Please inform me how they push back against “good stuff” for the consumer
Oh I don’t know, starting or popularising the trend of gluing the phone together, removing the 3.5mm jack, not adopting the standardised method for post-sms communication (rcs vs imessage) to name a few.
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.
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?
The criminals, terrorists and pedos won’t by affected. They will just switch to non weakened encryption.
It’s always been about mass surveillance.
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.
They had a different response to China though. Telling.
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.
Why can’t the UK govt simply rent their spyware from Israel, like everyone else?
What about other tech companies like Microsoft or Google? Do they comply?
