Time to start de-Appling
"You have some serious thinking to do about what you intend to trust to the Apple stack altogether going forward, even things like passwords."
Interesting to see this piece from privacy expert Heather Burns, who encourages UK-based users to start de-centering Apple products in their lives:
“You need to start that because, as we recently learned, at some point in the very near future Apple is withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature from the UK altogether as a result of the Home Office TCN through the Investigatory Powers Act.”
The key thing here is that it’s not Apple’s fault — this is driven by the British government, which is very intentionally reducing the privacy and security features available to its citizens. It wants security software to be back-doored; Apple does not want to provide back-doored software; so Apple simply removes its security features in the UK entirely.
For now, Signal remains an excellent option for messaging, although the Signal Foundation has indicated that it will leave the UK if it is asked to compromise its security. For other use cases, Proton may be a decent provider, although its CEO praising the Trump administration earlier this year certainly raised my eyebrows.
This legislation is clearly undemocratic and oppressive — delivered by secret order, no less — and it’s one of the dwindling remaining places where the US is following the better path (until it eventually, inevitably isn’t). What’s weird to me is that British people aren’t full-throatedly shouting their opposition. Many people seem to be in favor, for all the superficial “law and order” reasons that people often accept oppression. But it does need to be opposed with full throats, in Britain and everywhere else it turns up. Without freedom from surveillance there is no journalism, no activism, no freedom of speech or expression, and no democracy.
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