671–680 of 1001 posts
I don't think the UK government would try to put Apple out of business if they don't comply it's more likely that they would just get heavily fined until they do so. The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK rather than create some kind of backdoor. It's a weak proposition from the government because anyone with something to hide will just…
The US is the only country with codified freedoms from the government. Every other country has rights given by the government to their citizens. The US may suck every now and then, but the US constitution is one of the best things in human history. It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.
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Brit here. Yeah from my experience people don't care. Hardly anyone gets prosecuted and those who do have often done something bad. Most day to day complaints are they don't prosecute enough, often related to the bastard that snatched your phone. We have approximately zero people sitting in jail for failing to decrypt and similar. >This is a very obvious setup for future totalitarianism. No it really isn't. If they a…
Brit here. > Hardly anyone gets prosecuted and those who do have often done something bad. Perhaps often they've done something bad, but sometimes they haven't, that's the point. Obviously this is wrong and you shouldn't be so passive about it. > If they are planning a totalitarian takeover they are being very sneaky about it. There is a strong anti totalitarianism tradition here including elections since 1265, writi…
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It creates a nasty precedent doesn't it? If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile? I can't see on what basis the government thinks they're going to get to be exceptional here?
It's also worth noting that one of the ways the five eyes get around domestic spying laws is to spy on each other's citizens. So the CIA spy on British citizens the UK government want to spy on, and GCHQ spy on American citizens the US government want to spy on. So this would indirectly allow the US government to spy on US citizens (even more than it already does, anyway)
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It creates a nasty precedent doesn't it? If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile? I can't see on what basis the government thinks they're going to get to be exceptional here?
Why are you using Russia and China as examples of the bad guys here. They're not asking for global access to everyones data, the UK is. The UK are the bad guys.
(russia and china would love to have access to that data. so would a lot of other governments)
This is so disheartening. I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy narrative, but this says otherwise. As a UK citizen, is there anything I can do to dissuade this? edit: typo
I don't think the UK government would try to put Apple out of business if they don't comply it's more likely that they would just get heavily fined until they do so. The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK rather than create some kind of backdoor. It's a weak proposition from the government because anyone with something to hide will just…
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This is the way that the UK has passed laws for a while now, make them so broad that they potentially criminalise everyone, then selectively prosecute. This is a very obvious setup for future totalitarianism. I’m surprised that the British public stands for it, but I guess they must not care.
I've tried to explain the issues with the UK government's stance on digital privacy to my friends. The responses I get: * I have nothing to hide, I don't care * Oh come on, our government doesn't care what I'm up to * The UK will never be totalitarian. I'm not scared of the government * The UK civil service is incompetent and could never pull this off (fair point, although I worry about the safety of my personal data…
Or spiteful, authoritarian non-politicians taking power, spreading misinformation, and censoring free speech:
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/musk-shows-us-what-actua...