UK Government Issues New Order to Access iCloud User Data

[foobarbaz]

Say what you want about the US, but in most countries “rights” are given by the government (meaning they can be taken away by the government). In the US “rights” are recognized as inherent to humans, given by a creator, and thus the government may not restrict those rights except within limited circumstances (you can’t slander/libel someone).

The US is very distinct, many countries have copied “democratic ideas” like elections, but none have willingly recognized that humans have inherent rights from a power higher than the government and limited itself in accordance with that.

All these texts are super poetic and grandiose. So don't go on about how great it is in theory. What matters is reality. Bad governments, including many from US history, still manage to take away rights. And come on, the US was literally caught doing that surveillance thing a decade ago, and certainly not within limited circumstances.

That higher power is never enforcing those rights. It's people that need to look out for each other's rights. If you let a person's rights be trampled on, eventually, you'll be that person. And there isn't a country in the world that's immune to that.

 

[DblHelix]

What did they do before we had online file storage and communications? Did they open all mail to make sure no kiddie porn was being transferred? Did they open all safety deposit boxes or other storage devices to make sure people weren’t hiding ****? This is just modern forms of mail and secure storage. Should be treated the same.

 

[Mr_Ed]

This isn’t an Apple thing. It’s a UK government thing. And it’s just the start of a surveillance state. You don t think android and other operating systems are going to remain untouched?

As I read it, the context of that particular response was an Apple thing.

 

[insomniac86]

All these texts are super poetic and grandiose. So don't go on about how great it is in theory. What matters is reality. Bad governments, including many from US history, still manage to take away rights. And come on, the US was literally caught doing that surveillance thing a decade ago, and certainly not within limited circumstances.

That higher power is never enforcing those rights. It's people that need to look out for each other's rights. If you let a person's rights be trampled on, eventually, you'll be that person. And there isn't a country in the world that's immune to that.

Everyone forgets that the NSA were using every zero day under the sun to spy and collect every bit of data they possibly could. lol....

 

[turbineseaplane]

Everyone forgets that the NSA were using every zero day under the sun to spy and collect every bit of data they possibly could. lol....

And given what's going on in the US government right now (and moving forward), it's almost laughable that anyone thinks the US is going to be some beacon of privacy for its citizenry.

Tim "gold & glass statute for dear leader" Cook will be doing whatever he's told to do in the US, just like he already does in China.

 

[Aoligei]

Sometimes all it takes is a single person willing to make a stand that kicks off a revolution, like the guy at Tiananmen square who stood in front of a column of tanks and refused to move.

We're slowly reaching boiling point and someone is going to make a stand that unites the masses. Who, when, and where are still a mystery, but that day is coming.

We all know what happened with Tiananmen Square. You can also check what happened with Freedom Convoy in Canada, BML protest in United States.

Would you want repeat of this in UK? A revolution without consensus will not work. If you can hardly find people who agree with you, how could you even start a revolution?

You think revolution is easy. Do you know how many people sacrificed their lives for the Communist revolution? How many gave their lives for the belief in communism? You talk about revolution as if it were like attending a banquet, as if it could be achieved without any sacrifice. That is truly naive.

 

[I7guy]

As I read it, the context of that particular response was an Apple thing.

iCloud is an Apple thing, but governments imo rarely impose limits on themselves and this mentality will spread.

 

[Aoligei]

The UK never left the monarchy system, sure they “elect” a parliament, but the mindset, the feudalistic system idea of the few ruling over the masses is still very much present.

Say what you want about the US, but in most countries “rights” are given by the government (meaning they can be taken away by the government). In the US “rights” are recognized as inherent to humans, given by a creator, and thus the government may not restrict those rights except within limited circumstances (you can’t slander/libel someone).

The US is very distinct, many countries have copied “democratic ideas” like elections, but none have willingly recognized that humans have inherent rights from a power higher than the government and limited itself in accordance with that.

If rights are inherent to human, given by a creator, then why does residential school still occurred? What about Chinese exclusion act? What about Japanese concentration camps? What about NSA mass surveillance?

Is your creator being selective on who gets rights and who doesn’t?

 

[insomniac86]

And given what's going on in the US government right now (and moving forward), it's almost laughable that anyone thinks the US is going to be some beacon of privacy for its citizenry.

So what next? If we accept the narrative that most governments want full visibility into everything their citizens do, think, eat, breathe, and even excrete, wrapped in endless pretexts like “for the children,” “for your safety,” or “to fight misinformation”.

What kind of world will we have in 10 years? Picture a society where surveillance isn’t just external but internalised. Every device, every transaction, every movement logged. Every opinion weighed against an algorithmic “acceptable thought” standard. Privacy ceases to be a right and becomes a suspicious act in itself.

This isn’t paranoia; it’s trajectory. Incremental normalisation of monitoring under benevolent slogans is exactly how total visibility takes root. The question isn’t whether you’re “hiding something.” The question is whether you’re willing to live in a future where nothing of yours is hidden at all.

 

[turbineseaplane]

So what next? If we accept the narrative that most governments want full visibility into everything their citizens do, think, eat, breathe, and even excrete. wrapped in endless pretexts like “for the children,” “for your safety,” or “to fight misinformation”.

I have no idea - but it's dark.

The sort of problems we are staring down, traditionally, have only been solved with war & revolutions.

We have people all over who've had a very comfortable existence for all of their lives and apparently haven't studied much history.

There could be some very shocking times ahead that won't be solved by posting about it, retweeting about it, "liking" the right content, etc.

 

[VulchR]

Sometimes all it takes is a single person willing to make a stand that kicks off a revolution, like the guy at Tiananmen square who stood in front of a column of tanks and refused to move.
...

Actually that happened after the massacre, on a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square, but that iconic picture still still amazes me, and your point stands.

 

[surferfb]

It's because they make more money from you backing up to their servers, as opposed to a drive you yourself own.

I know it's fun and en vogue to blame "greedy Tim Cook" for everything, but in all honestly this is almost certainly not it.

It's much more likely that building the feature isn't worth it because the number of users who would take advantage of such a system is infinitesimally small, it'd be a significant engineering effort, and the support complexities when things went wrong would be massive. I say this as someone who runs a Linux-based server and Synology NAS at home and would absolutely take advantage of the feature.

The technical reality is that Apple would need to support network discovery and authentication across dozens of NAS platforms (Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, unRAID, Western Digital, and countless DIY setups) each running different firmware versions, file systems, and protocols (SMB, NFS, WebDAV, etc.). They'd need to QA every iOS update against this fragmented ecosystem, troubleshoot user network configurations, handle partial backup failures across unreliable home networks, and somehow ensure data integrity on storage they don't control. And when backups inevitably fail because someone's router rebooted or their NAS ran out of space, Apple Support would be stuck debugging home network infrastructure they have zero control over.

Adding NAS support would explode their support costs and QA burden to serve maybe 0.1% of users who are tech-savvy enough to actually configure it properly. From a business perspective, it's simply not worth the engineering resources and support headaches.

That doesn't mean Apple shouldn't consider doing it anyway. But it also wouldn't prevent the UK from demanding "Apple builds a backdoor to any encrypted backup they allow to be exported to third party NAS." So I am not sure what it would really solve, particularly when users can already backup to a Mac or PC and encrypt the backup that way.

 

[MacLawyer]

UK users will no longer have the iCloud storage option. Really a shame.

 

[insomniac86]

I have no idea - but it's dark.

The sort of problems we are staring down, traditionally, have only been solved with war & revolutions.

We have people all over who've had a very comfortable existence for all of their lives and apparently haven't studied much history.

There could be some very shocking times ahead that won't be solved by posting about it, retweeting about it, "liking" the right content, etc.

You made me think twice about hitting like on your comment. Good work

Agreed, it's just interesting to see this all take place. As you've said, it's war and revolutions that create change, not posting on forums.

With that said, the majority seem to just take a back seat and watch this all play out as if it were a movie. I assume because they all feel powerless in that they are too small to actually make a difference.

 

[Mr_Ed]

iCloud is an Apple thing, but governments imo rarely impose limits on themselves and this mentality will spread.

Yeah, I am not hopeful this type of erosion of privacy at the hands of government can be curtailed once enough of the legislators (whatever form they take in your country) are either in support of, or indifferent to the measures. In the US (and UK, I imagine), it would take enough citizens making it clear to their representatives that they will be voted out and lose power if they proceed. Unfortunately, the vast majority of citizens are dealing with real, pressing day-to-day stresses that if asked to honestly rank their priorities, something like this probably wouldn't make their top five.

 

[insomniac86]

UK users will no longer have the iCloud storage option. Really a shame.

That's never gonna happen on Apple's Watch...
Way too much money to be made selling cloud storage to the UK users.
UK iCloud data will simply become accessible to the UK government.

I will remind you that unless you've enabled "advanced data protection" your current iCloud data is accessible by Apple. They have the decryption key to your account.

 

[orbital~debris]

They have been a surveillance state since before the London bombing. I remember going on a school trip to London in 2005 and I was " amazed" by the amount of CCTV literally everywhere

a) but much of it is not centralised – an important distinction; there's no concerted, joined-up effort to have all manner of CCTV systems instantly accessible to everyone and his dog. A clue is in the meaning of the acronym…

b) these days, large numbers of people have willingly added cameras to their front doors, across the land. This has generated something of a 'vigilante' attitude in online community forums

 

[Ctrlos]

I'm not going to turn this into a discussion on the current UK administration, but its crap like this that are making decent citizens of all social classes turn on Labour which I don't really want to see.

It's worth mentioning again that iCloud isn't a real backup solution as stuff wiped from your phone also disappears from the cloud even if there is a recall feature. Stuff is better off properly backed up to a local drive of some sort.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

I'm not going to turn this into a discussion on the current UK administration, but its crap like this that are making decent citizens of all social classes turn on Labour which I don't really want to see.

It's worth mentioning again that iCloud isn't a real backup solution as stuff wiped from your phone also disappears from the cloud even if there is a recall feature. Stuff is better off properly backed up to a local drive of some sort.

iCloud drive/sync and iCloud backup aren't the same thing, and deleting something from your phone doesn't remove it from an iCloud backup, until the next backup overwrites it..but it does remove it from iCloud drive (or photos, or whatever).

 

[Aoligei]

So what next? If we accept the narrative that most governments want full visibility into everything their citizens do, think, eat, breathe, and even excrete, wrapped in endless pretexts like “for the children,” “for your safety,” or “to fight misinformation”.

What kind of world will we have in 10 years? Picture a society where surveillance isn’t just external but internalised. Every device, every transaction, every movement logged. Every opinion weighed against an algorithmic “acceptable thought” standard. Privacy ceases to be a right and becomes a suspicious act in itself.

There is something called consensus. Every society has some short of consensus that makes society a society. This consensus is something that no one can break.

Your speech, your opinion would be judged and possibly faces consequences. This has always been this way. Acceptable standards already exists, and people are been judged and possibly jailed.

This isn’t something new.

This isn’t paranoia; it’s trajectory. Incremental normalisation of monitoring under benevolent slogans is exactly how total visibility takes root. The question isn’t whether you’re “hiding something.” The question is whether you’re willing to live in a future where nothing of yours is hidden at all.

This is depends on your scope. I don’t think any government will install cameras inside your house. Anything you say in private or in public will be known and you will need to be responsible for what you say or what you do.

 

[Aoligei]

Actually that happened after the massacre, on a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square, but that iconic picture still still amazes me, and your point stands.

There isn’t any massacre. I know this will be downvoted. The tank man was not killed. Tank can easily run this guy over but they didn’t.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

There isn’t any massacre. I know this will be downvoted. The tank man was not killed. Tank can easily run this guy over but they didn’t.

Tank man wasn't run over, but no one knows who he is either..so no idea what happened to him after the photo.

Officially, China says that ~500 people were killed at the Tiananmen Square protests. Declassified intelligence from Britain says a minimum of 10,000, but I would call even 500 people killed at a protests a massacre, regardless of how many people were present in total.

Believe what you will.

 

[TOM1211]

With it still turned on for me I’m waiting for the Apple update that breaks it do I stay on a lower iOS with it turned on? Or will I be forced to update remains to be seen but it’s still on for now

 

[canadianreader]

You want to protect your privacy ? It’s simple connect your phone to your computer and backup using finder and disable all iCloud features. The less convenient the more private.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Tank man wasn't run over, but no one knows who he is either..so no idea what happened to him after the photo.

Officially, China says that ~500 people were killed at the Tiananmen Square protests. Declassified intelligence from Britain says a minimum of 10,000 but I would call even 500 people killed at a protests as a massacre, regardless of how many people are present in total.

Believe what you will.

I don't believe 500, I know that much! 😂