Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#711

Post by talldayo »

dehrmann wrote: post #708

Also on the front page, "German civil activists win victory in election case against Musk's X" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975170 They're not exactly the same, but you should have similar feelings about forcing a company to hand over data to researchers and forcing a company to install a back door for law enforcement.

I don't care about either, they're voluntary problems. You're a moron for trusting X with your data, you're a moron for trusting Apple with it too. It's just like how Apple defenders said with iMessage - "just buy a different phone if you care, duh."

All of the sudden people start caring, acting like they never had the chance to regulate their OEM of choice. No, you get exactly what you paid for. You trust Apple, don't you? They're a prestige company, they'd never sell you out. Probably. Oops[0].

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#712

Post by talldayo »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #710
Shakahs wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcing Twitter to make public posts easily accessible is not at all the same as compelling Apple to hand over your private messages.

Not the same, but still batsh#t.

On today's episode of "America Learns Why Europe Was Right To Enforce GDPR"

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#713

Post by gessha »

convolvatron wrote: post #443
docmars wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give Apple a big enough incentive to negotiate with and they may very well cave. If I've learned anything about corporations, it's that money and incentives always speak louder than their purported values.

this isn't apple weighing ethics against revenue. this is apple being forced to decide how much their pro-privacy marketing is really getting them in the market.

Given that privacy is why my friends and I have iPhones, Apple will lose a lot of users and developers if they go back on privacy in any way.

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#714

Post by tonyarkles »

ycombinatrix wrote: post #648
SkyBelow wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such actions, even just the act of deleting text, conveys a message you were ordered to not convey and the government is not likely to take too kindly to that.

That is a fraudulent TOS if you're lying to the customer though

Not exactly the same but I've had a discussion around a similar topic with a Canadian immigration lawyer. We were put in contact by a mutual friend and the lawyer was looking for an email provider that was hosted in Canada and didn't rely on any US-based services (e.g. spam filtering). I asked him about the requirement and he pointed out that it was legally impossible for him to simultaneously comply with the USA PATRIOT Act and Canadian data protection/privacy laws. The US Gov't could compel his email provider to disclose solicitor-client privileged data with a gag order, and by not telling his client he would be breaking Canadian law.

By putting statements like what you're proposing in your TOS or marketing material you are potentially setting yourself up for a situation where it's now impossible to comply with all applicable laws. As others have mentioned, Australia passed legislation preventing you from disclosing the existence or non-existence of specific legal documents; they're at least warning you up front that the canary itself is illegal. The solution is to not make marketing statements that would become fraudulent in a situation where you can't legally retract them, unfortunately.

Edit: since lawyers are mentioned here... if the lawyer who is telling you that you need to remove the line from the TOS is the same lawyer who told you it was ok to put the line in the TOS... you should probably find a new lawyer because they didn't think through the consequences of approving it in the first place.

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#715

Post by tonyarkles »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #572
blindriver wrote: post #535

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.

While the US does have a written Constitution that explicitly limits government power (notably in the Bill of Rights), many other countries also have codified documents or legal frameworks that protect citizens from government overreach. For example, Germany's Basic Law (Grundgesetz) was created after World War II to ensure the protection of human rights, including freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, among ot…

> In Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of the Constitution Act of 1982 and guarantees a range of civil liberties.

I would like to point out Section 1 of the Charter:

> 1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

There is a ton of complexity to determining whether or not Charter violations by the government will actually have any kind of consequential remedy for those whose rights have been violated. None of the rights or freedoms in it are strictly absolute and there's legislation that infringes on many of them with those infringements held as "reasonable" by the courts.

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#716

Post by lakis »

afro88 wrote: post #523
TrueDuality wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as Apple has a business presence in the UK, they are subject to the laws the UK imposes on them even if they're vastly overreaching and impose on other government's citizens. Not supporting cloud services wouldn't be sufficient to avoid the compliance requirement, they would have to formerly stop doing business in the UK. Looking at the market size that might be a decision that Apple is willing to make as it…

The decision wouldn't involve just market size, but their Irish tax haven as well. They're not going to pull out of the UK entirely.

Ireland is in EU. UK is not in EU anymore

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#717

Post by altairprime »

talldayo wrote: post #567
altairprime wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Apple isn’t based in the UK and owes no fealty to their government. I don’t agree that your citation is relevant here. Apple is a US company. Bribing local officials to overlook the gay founder is sensible corporate practices, however uncomfortable that is to consider. Revoking privacy guarantees globally, reversing years of public opinion gains overnight, is not. The UK cannot do anything to materially harm Apple…

> As Apple isn’t based in the UK and owes no fealty to their government Apple isn't based in China, they owe nothing to them either. Apple's willingness to backdoor and modify their services for actual authoritarianism is well[0] documented[1], at no point did they ever threaten to leave the respective markets. Every single spectator knows that Apple leaving these markets would be an admission of guilt. > Bribing loc…

China is not the UK, and isn’t comparable, any more than the US was. Apple’s manufacturing is far more dependent on China than it is the UK, with one exception: Arm. Legitimately, if the UK government declare Arm to be unexportable to the US, they can completely fuck over everyone except Apple, who I expect has a Complete Code license or equivalent so that they can continue development of Arm goes bankrupt or gets cut off from international trade.

A better question that supports the point here is:

Which of the world’s countries are able to materially damage Apple’s ability to transact business in other countries?

Those countries hold serious and real leverage over Apple, because Apple can’t just walk away from doing business in that one country without having their business impacted elsewhere. The UK is not on my version of that list, but if you’ve a good reason why it should be, that’s the missing data here and that’s invaluable leverage to recognize. (It may well also already be documented in Apple’s financials.)

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#718

Post by compootr »

Spivak wrote: post #365
jibe wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has forced Apple to outsource iCloud in China to a state run company, so all data is just directly controlled by the government there. It’s an even worse situation. https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754

We literally tried to do this with TikTok. We can't exactly stand on a high-horse when the highest level of government in the US was totally fine with it. Our noble "we can't have American data in the hands of our enemies," their savage "forcing American companies to turn over user data."

I disagree. Apple is a hardware company but TT is a shithole social media

in other words, you store much more data on a phone versus a doomscrolling app[*]

*: unless you make videos and publish PII in them :)

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#720

Post by anonym29 »

coolspot wrote: post #519
gist wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess what? Trump will (hopefully) come to the rescue here. Don't laugh at that. I'd imagine he will be helpful possibly even with some of the EU rules such as in particular the one which makes even small US companies liable (as I recal) for notifying users of cookies on a website.

Tim Apple has been on inauguration, so very possible.

Is calling him Tim Apple some sort of inside joke I'm out of the loop on? We don't call Elon "Elon Tesla" or Satya "Satya Microsoft".
Post reply on HN