1495 points by samwillis 955 days ago | 749 comments on HN
| Mild positive
Contested
Editorial · v3.7· 2026-02-28 10:39:48 0
Summary Privacy & Encryption Rights Advocates
9to5Mac reports on Apple's commitment to remove iMessage and FaceTime from the UK market rather than implement encryption backdoors mandated by the Online Safety Bill. The article advocates for privacy protection and encryption as fundamental rights, presenting Apple's position as principled defense of user privacy against government surveillance infrastructure. Coverage emphasizes secure communication as a non-negotiable human right.
The current conservative government is on its last legs before being banished for at least a decade. It appears they already have their eyes on the lucrative private sector and are willing to vandalise the UK with little thought to public protest.
I wonder why the UK legislators not preparing a new regulation mandating every keys to every door and safe having a bypass mechanism for government officials.
Behind every door and every locked place there could be child pornography and illicit materials hidden!! Every house, every hotel safe are suspects!
Criminal oversight, criminal oversight!
(and if they think their reasoning for backdoors into online chat and conversation is mandated by this supid reasoning of theirs then it must be valid for all entrance doors of every home and buidlding and every locked spaces as well! Getting easy access to material without assistance or knowledge of the people involved.)
Why do the British still think they have power to do dumb stuff like this? Their economy is floundering, their consumer market is small, and their government is a joke.
There's a lot of good reasons to hate Apple, but when they're right they're right, and I definitely appreciate that they're willing to stand up for something like this, even if it is in their best interest.
In China they are running their own infrastructure on servers owned by party-affiliated businesses. I wonder how strong their encryption is over there?
China blocks many services with strong encryption but it doesn’t block iMessage.
The same Apple that lets the CCP operate its entire App Store in China?
It's easy to criticize a government when you know there will be no retaliation. To judge a company's true stance on such issues see how they behave when there's a prospect of real financial loss.
The UK keeps trying to throw their weight around only to find out they aren’t that big. The CMA with Xbox and now this. They aren’t large enough for Apple and Microsoft to make massive changes just to accommodate a relatively small market.
I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim. And perhaps that's true to some extent. But since most people believe the battle is lost, moreso that this has always been the status quo, then any battle on the subject is lost before it has a chance to begin. We have capitulated on privacy, because it's a vague concept and we don't equate it with freedom, or perhaps our sense of being free is so ingrained in modern societies that we see no risk to it being lost lest something drastic and immediate takes it away, when in fact the very system designed to protect our freedoms (led by people that look like us, think like us and enjoy these freedoms as much as we do) is malfunctioning and slowly erodes rights that previous generations enjoyed. We're not collectively trying to harm our freedoms and yet here we are.
And shortsightedness on the side of lawmakers is baffling. Nobody takes responsibility for vision, we just go along with implementing solutions without considering broader impact or history. If the government has all your correspondence and the government falls into the wrong hands, you're toast, assuming you do not align with the leadership. We're writing that possibility off, but someone gets to brag that they've written legislation to stop the bad guys -- and maybe they did, but the cost was our collective freedom.
Every generation has its PGP / Clipper Chip / etc battle. Eventually we'll lose. But hopefully we're not ready to give up yet.
I read today that the younger generation grew up with and is so used to surveillance they don't care. It's just a thing. But old codgers like me most definitely care.
There was an interview with the CEO of Signal and some UK conservative politician[1]. It's a pretty infuriating interview, as both parties try to debate two complete separate issues. Meredith Whittaker of Signal, rightfully tries to debate the issues with breaking encryption and it's ramification, but the politician has that sorted. See they don't want to break the encryption, they want the apps to pick up the messages BEFORE encryption and side channel them to some government agency, at least that's my understanding. They want on device access to the message, which the app have, they just also want that information searched, indexed and filtered and sent to the police.
It's sad that these politicians don't see the problem... Well either don't see or understand, or they full well understand and that's the point, they're just doing a poor job of explaining why.
Why not a similarly brave stance in China? In China Apple claims it "obeys all local laws" except in the UK it wants to be courageous? I guess it's a brave state unless the $$$ are good.
The interesting thing is that the government can have access to your conversations today. They just need to get judge order and search your phone (end-to-end encryption doesn't help if you don't delete messages). Same things as knocking on the door with a judge order. But the government doesn't want to deal with judges. They want unlimited access 24/7. That's the key difference and this is why this is bad for all the citizens.
First they came for protests, now they want to tackle encryption.
I don't think they like the ability of people to share unofficial information and organize themselves in huge numbers.[0]
People were sharing anti-propaganda propaganda stickers on telegram too.[1] (2:40 the bus is covered in them, also saw a vid where an entire police car was covered in them.)
I am reminded of a conversation on Security Now where Steve Gibson recommended that each website that has traffic inside the UK to have a red banner at the top of the page to sentiment of something like, "The UK Government is forcibly watching traffic on this website."
Watch how quickly that turns the conversation around.
This argument lawmakers have here is entirely built upon the straw man. I understand the deep yearning to protect children but all this won't make the criminals stop using the tools that are currently legal. They will continue to use them. Making them "illegal" won't make them stop using them because they can still be acquired.
Someone should bring up lawyer and doctor privilege as an argument. Phones are intimately personal devices that people take to their homes and use for a lot of very private stuff. Phones cannot fulfill their job as a personal device and be a police snitch at the same time just like lawyers cannot advise their clients and inform the police at the same time. There needs to be a personal computer privilege.
iMessage and FaceTime are available in China, but it hardly matters because most communication in China happens over WeChat. If all the important stuff is happening over the heavily monitored app, leaving a few scragglers is not a big deal. Especially because, it's not like a criminal gang is going to have the money to arm every member with an iPhone with China's wages (and the ones that do are likely white-collar and detectable elsewhere), and it's also not like Apple is allowed to actively advertise or even discuss themselves as being "more secure than WeChat."
EDIT: Also, ~80%-90% of iPhone users in the country likely have iCloud Backup on. iCloud Backup is not E2E-encrypted in China, and is hosted by a Chinese company instead of Apple. If you want full E2E, you need to use iMessage and hope everyone in the party doesn't have iCloud Backup on... and that's a pretty niche threat now.
That could be true? IIRC, PRISM was less about direct access, and more about abusing every potential method of gaining information.
For example, imagine a Login page that said, "Password incorrect," versus "User does not exist." If you have "User does not exist," you could use that to figure out whether a given email address has an account with a service. That could be useful information to PRISM when looking for a target to subpoena or monitor. (This is also why it's now best practice to just say "Login incorrect" or something vague that doesn't say whether the username, or the password, was wrong.)
As far as "We have never heard of PRISM", that could be true. When you receive a national security letter it isn't like they give you detailed info about the specific operation and why you are receiving it. It's more along the lines of "you're going to do this pursuant to US code section..."
My understanding is that Messages and Facetime are still E2E encrypted in China. However, if you back things up in iCloud, China does have the keys to decrypt that. The difference is the UK wants to violate E2E encryption in Messages/FT.
I could be wrong about the current state, but I need to see evidence first.
Kinda apropos, I’ve used international data roaming in mainland China and was (initially) astonished to find it totally bypassed the GFW and I could run IPsec and SSH unencumbered, none of the unabashed MITM fuckery I saw from using strong crypto over Chinese hotel wifi for more than a couple of seconds. That was a few years ago, I don’t know where their interception regime is at today, but it was a reminder that propaganda begins at home.
We now know that PRISM was (is?) the NSA internal source designation for data acquired through FISA warrants executed by the FBI.
So actually Apple was being honest. They had not heard of PRISM, because that term was only used inside the NSA. And they were not allowing direct government access to their servers, they were responding to FISA warrants.
In a word, populists. This is part of a stance of being 'tough on crime'. Whether or not the bill succeeds or fails isn't really important, what's important is that they can trumpet how tough on crime they are. If it fails it's not their fault, it's the opposition and how they care more about criminals' rights than your/childrens' safety etc. etc.
As to why the public themselves go for it, the media landscape in the UK is in a pretty bad way at the moment. An enormous amount of power is still wielded by the traditional press - specifically the power to set the national conversation.
The UK and China are not comparable. China is the worlds most populous country (for now). The UK has a population of under 70m. China is a totalitarian regime where even an imperfect freedom is preferable to no freedom at all. The UK is a democratic country which should be upholding the right to privacy.
If Apple weakens crypto for the UK, it affects people in other countries as well. iMessage is not exactly popular in the UK, so it is disproportionately used for transatlantic communication compared to WhatsApp. If Apple complies with the law, they are violating the privacy of users in the US as well.
I'll play Devil's Advocate (because I enjoy throwing myself into the fray — especially when arguing against a point I actually agree with).
No one is mass-sharing their safe of child-porn worldwide with thousands of other child-porn voyeurs.
The internet and its ubiquitous accessibility combined with digital image file formats has changed the landscape for those that would fight these heinous crimes.
It is indeed a new and special case where a locked safe is not.
You don't think there's a prospect of financial loss? They literally just said they would pull their products.
Ecosystem features like those are huge contributors to platform retention. And if the cynic in you doesn't believe that, just ask yourself why they burn the money to keep staffing development and maintenance teams for iMessage and FaceTime - they aren't doing it out of kindness right?
In the end the choice is simple: follow local laws or drop features or devices.
The calculation is going to be different in each country, but there is no hypocrisy here.
The Chinese government messing with Chinese servers affect the Chinese market, which makes a lot of money so there is a strong incentive to remain in it. The UK backdooring FaceTime compromises it for the rest of the world and would actually put Apple in jeopardy in other jurisdictions with stronger privacy and data protection laws, for a comparatively minor market. It’d be more significant if the issue was with the EU or the US (both scenarios can realistically happen in the next few years, unfortunately). All they are saying is that they will comply if the regulations are put in place. Also, the British government is known for making noises along these lines before quietly dropping the whole project when it turns out that it’s actually not that simple. Different countries will lead to different risk assessments.
So yeah, there is no inconsistency, it’s just a matter of how you stay on the clear side of the law.
> It's easy to criticize a government when you know there will be no retaliation. To judge a company's true stance on such issues see how they behave when there's a prospect of real financial loss.
A company is not sentient, it does not have a stance. Its policies have no value except when they are decided and enforced by people. It’s dangerous to talk of corporations in terms of ideology, because these things can change and often cash trumps good intentions. In the end all that matters is how much the company and our interests align. The best way to have a company behave over the long term is if it makes sense for it to do so from a business point of view.
This kind of black and white thinking is defeatist.
China: already a lost cause (before iPhones and messaging existed, in fact).
The UK: a leading western nation.
Let's try to have western countries not be like China? The UK could be a domino... if it falls the authoritarians in other western countries may be emboldened to follow.
Seems nobody uses iMessage in China. The stats I can find don't even list it. Maybe they're ok with leaving it as a way for visitors to talk to people at home.
Prism also involved an NSA program that was done without the knowledge of the tech companies. They inserted a splitter on the fiber lines leaving data centers to copy all the traffic.
To me, there is one big argument for privacy: You never know what your govewrnment will change into in the next few years. This basic argument for encryption is often raised in combination with countries which we already consider non-free. But, frankly, I have finally learned the true meaning of this message during COVID times. I would never have expected society deteriorating into this fear/hate driven, media induced witchhunt. Since that experience, I basically expect anything frm the government, which makes the argument for being able to encrypt communication even stronger for me.
70M is small, but not that small. Larger than any US state, larger than most countries in the EU.
It's also anglophone, which to anglophone companies (Apple still is, to a significant degree), means that its 70M are worth a bit more than the absolute number suggests.
>I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private.
A big part of the issue is that the nature of the conversations has changed. Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private. The idea of having complete privacy in such conversations is actually rather new.
The difference is that those communication mediums now represent nearly all communication, rather than a small fraction of it, and that the effort to meaningfully break that privacy has dropped significantly over what it would have required to surveil millions of people in the 1950s. It doesn't require an East-German-esque security state anymore.
> I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private.
The USA is still doing pretty good but the UK and the EU are staunchly anti privacy. They're pretty good on consumer privacy but don't believe that privacy from the government should exist.
Given the possibility of invisible and essentially free screening of private conversations, the analogy is probably more "install cameras in every home that only the government can access". But we promise, they'll be turned off most of the time.
CORE ARTICLE: The content fundamentally advocates for privacy of correspondence through encryption. Apple's stated willingness to remove services entirely rather than implement backdoors is framed as principled defense of encrypted private communication. Headline, structure, and editorial voice consistently support privacy protection.
FW Ratio: 63%
Observable Facts
Apple threatened to disable iMessage and FaceTime for UK users rather than implement backdoors.
Article headline explicitly states Apple would 'remove' apps rather than 'break end-to-end encryption'.
Bill aims to 'scan end-to-end encrypted messages' for illegal content.
Apple submitted nine-page opposition citing 'backdoors for end-to-end encryption' as unacceptable requirement.
Site contains Google AdSense advertisement tags enabling commercial data collection.
Inferences
Article advocates that correspondence privacy via encryption is non-negotiable and worth service removal.
Framing positions privacy as a fundamental right that should not be sacrificed for government surveillance capability.
Structural contradiction exists between article's pro-privacy advocacy and domain's ad-tracking data practices.
The content advocates for encryption as foundational to human dignity and security. Apple's refusal to weaken encryption for all users invokes UDHR principles of universal human rights protection.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
Apple submitted a nine-page opposition to the bill stating it would not implement encryption backdoors.
Apple threatened to remove iMessage and FaceTime from UK market rather than comply.
Multiple tech companies (WhatsApp, Signal, Apple) oppose the legislation.
The article frames encryption as a protective mechanism for individual rights.
Inferences
The article positions encryption protection as foundational to human dignity, consistent with UDHR preamble.
The framing suggests encryption-enabled privacy is non-negotiable across all jurisdictions.
Implicitly engages due process by framing government message scanning as a threat to legal oversight of investigation. Apple's opposition to 'disabling security features before appeals process' directly invokes procedural fairness.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Apple objects to requirement that 'security features [be] disabled before an appeals process can take place'.
UK government wants 'ability to scan end-to-end encrypted messages' without specification of legal authorization process.
Apple argues requirements lack adequate procedural safeguards.
Inferences
Warrantless message scanning would violate presumption of innocence by enabling investigation without legal process.
Requiring security disablement before appeals constitutes denial of procedural due process protections.
The article frames end-to-end encryption as enabling secure communication channels necessary for free expression. Encrypted correspondence is presented as protective of individual communication autonomy.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
The article defends encryption as a fundamental feature of communication services.
Secure, private communication channels are presented as necessary for unrestricted correspondence.
Article does not explicitly discuss 'expression' but frames encryption as enabling communication freedom.
Inferences
Encrypted communication enables free expression by protecting content from unauthorized access.
Backdoors would threaten free expression by enabling third-party interception of private communication.
The article advocates that individuals must be able to communicate securely as precondition for expression freedom.
The article frames end-to-end encryption as a security measure protecting users against unauthorized access, invoking digital security dimensions of liberty and personal security.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
The article describes encryption as a security mechanism protecting private communication.
Headline emphasizes Apple 'protecting' encryption against government circumvention.
The content does not address physical safety or non-digital security contexts.
Inferences
Encryption is presented as protecting security of person in digital context.
Site accessibility enables informed user engagement with security rights discourse.
Site employs Google AdSense tracking (visible in HTML), representing data collection for advertising that undermines privacy protections advocated in article.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 10:41:39 UTC
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