According to a report from Reuters, Apple has lodged an appeal against an order from the British government that mandates the creation of a “back door” in its highly secure cloud storage systems. This information was disclosed by sources familiar with the situation to the Financial Times on Tuesday. In response to government requests for access to user data, the tech giant decided to eliminate its most advanced security encryption for cloud data, known as Advanced Data Protection (ADP), in Britain last month. This move by Apple is regarded as unprecedented in nature.
By removing the Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature, Apple now possesses the ability to access iCloud backups in specific instances where it was previously unable to do so. This includes acquiring copies of iMessages and furnishing them to authorities if legally compelled. With end-to-end encryption activated, even Apple itself would be incapable of accessing the data stored in the cloud.
The ongoing conflict between governments and technology companies over robust encryption to safeguard consumers’ communications continues unabated. Authorities perceive strong encryption as a hindrance to their mass surveillance and crime prevention efforts. The demands made by the UK government are considered to be extremely far-reaching.
President Donald Trump recently drew a parallel between the UK government’s request and practices observed in China during an interview with The Spectator political magazine. The Financial Times revealed that Apple filed an appeal against the order at a similar time as it pulled ADP from the UK, choosing not to comply with the technical capability notice issued by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in January.
Requests for comments from Britain’s Home Office and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, as well as Apple, went unanswered at the time of the report. Last week, Reuters reported that U.S. officials were looking into whether Britain breached a bilateral agreement by reportedly pressuring Apple to create a “back door” for government access to encrypted cloud backups. This action could potentially violate the CLOUD Act, which prohibits the United Kingdom and the United States from demanding data belonging to each other’s citizens.
The reporting was done by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and the editing was carried out by Shinjini Ganguli, Krishna Chandra Eluri, and Alan Barona.
