Apple is known as the gold standard when it comes to security and privacy in smart devices. They have doubled down on their encryption since the past few years, but it has been under the scrutiny of many European countries. Today, it was announced that Apple device owners in the UK will no longer be able to use the iCloud powered end-to-end encryption on their devices.

So, what exactly happened?

Basically, Apple has this feature known as Advanced Data Protection, which is basically a safety vaiult for. your iCloud content. Unlike most pre-enabled encryption features, this feature needs to be enabled, but once you do it, the content on your iCloud is accessible only by you. Not even Apple or even your government can access the data on your iCloud. As expected, when this feature was rolled out, it was massively adopted by everyone around the world, and why not? I mean c’mon, all that iCloud space, all your data secure on the cloud, with little to no risk of anyone other than you gaining access to it. Total bliss, right?

Well, as it turns out, the UK government was not really fond of this feature, and the moment they caught wind of this, they hit Apple with an order from the Investigatory Powers Act, 2016, which basically said – “Hey Apple, you want to give power to the users, GG, but you will have to build us a backdoor, so we can access the data of our citizens whenever we want”. Now, here’s the catch. A backdoor would technically allow the UK government to access the iCloud data of the people living in the UK, but if they wanted, they could extend that access globally, and snoop around the iCloud data of users in other parts of the world as well. Red Flag Pro max.

 

 

Apple was having none of that, and responded to the order by going out and axing the Advanced Data Protection feature for all UK users. The company reiterated that they would not be building any backdoors for anyone, not now, not in the future.

Obviously, this means that if you are an iDevice user in the UK, you will be receiving the standard encryption features on their devices, but that juicy Advanced Data Protection….not anymore. Does this affect users in other coutries? Not at the moment at least. I mean, your government will have to pull off the same shit with Apple for them to do something drastic like this. However, if you are planning to visit or move to the UK, your access to Advanced Data Protection will vanish when you hit their airspace.