Apple has said planned changes to British surveillance laws could affect iPhone users’ privacy by forcing it to withdraw security features, which could ultimately lead to the closure of services such as FaceTime and iMessage in the UK.
Everyone commeting here saying “good, we will switch to X” is absolutely stupid. This law means no iMessage, no Signal, no WhatsApp, no Telegram, no secure encrypted messaging for anyone.
People completely missing the point for an opportunity to shit on Apple is on brand though. Lol.
Oh I think there is hundreds reasons to shit on Apple, but this ain’t one of them.
Either that or an app that has been vetted by government stooges and given the thumbs up as its trivial for others to access the content on.
Great! If you’re technical and not have iOS. That’s already 50% of British market not using it.
Besides, it won’t help you if that’s a government mandate, and Google will be forced to take it down for the UK market from the store. Not a lot of people are installing apps from outside the Play Store.
Too bad if people arent willing to adapt. I guess you’ll just have to use paper notes and face to face contact, or whatever app your government makes. /S
I don’t believe Tox has had a security audit so be careful using it
Good luck enforcing that.
Anyway the criminals are just going to switch to something else so this law is useless
Bullshit. Open source distributed messaging clients will always exist. The key is to federate and host in other countries.
Okay, try explaining it to my 51 years old father. Or someone who really isn’t into tech in general.
Federated stuff will work for you and I - technically knowledgeable people. But we are a tiny fraction of population. The success of WhatsApp lays in its super simplicity.
Click this link, type email and password. Federated services are just as easy from UX side. The complexity is the backend.
It seems easy, but the moment you ask the user to “choose their instance” - you already push away a lot of untechnical people. What is an instance? How do I know which one is good? Will I be able to talk to people on other instances (look at Lemmy, some instances are blocked by other instances)? Why do I even have to choose an instance?
From an UX standpoint, that’s a disaster. Stuff like Lemmy or Mastodon will remain forever a niche, because of that.
EDIT: Typo
Yeah, don’t tell your grandpa to pick an instance. Just link him straight to the registration page. Solved.
Lemmy is the same. Facebook is the same. You don’t need to tell a user that their Facebook account is going to be shared by their geography. That doesn’t matter.
Just link then to the registration page for the instance that you use. Easy.
Good. Let’s all move to signal
Signal have already said they will withdraw completely from the UK, as have WhatsApp, Session and a few others.
Lol UK losing WhatsApp. Yikes.
Yeah. Whatsapp’s the big one in europe.
EU when?
A service i would gladly lose completely
If and when Signal is packaged for F-Droid, how is the British government going to stop people in the UK from using Signal?
Knowing this gvmt, they’ll try and prevent access at the ISP level. They’ve already started making noises about tackling ‘the menace of VPN’s’.
They’ll be out in six months to a year and since it takes them forever to achieve anything I wouldn’t worry.
If you’ve got to have a right wing fascist government hope for an incompetent one.
Which would be fine except Starmer approves of all the things contained in the various bits of legislation.
I never would’ve thought that the US would be the place for better privacy
How will that prevent people from using them?
No, move to something that’s federated and not run by a corporation
For real, wish I lived in the UK so I could get all my friends to adopt signal finally lol
Signal will shut down too though lol
The UK cannot believe every tech company will allow the govt to pre-approve updates instead of just pulling out.
I think you underestimate the deep stupidity and tech-ignorance of our politicians, coupled with their burning desire to know everything that we do. This is a set of people who think hidden == illegal.
Unfortunately both big parties tend towards authoritarianism too. The ‘nanny state’ is popular with voters.
Clipper chip.
This is a set of people who think hidden == illegal.
This is a fundamental shift in mentality that has occurred over the last 30 years and it’s startling how many average people have bought in. There doesn’t need to be a reason for something to be legal, rather there needs to be a compelling reason for it not to be. People have stopped viewing freedom as fundamental right, but rather as something granted to them by the government on a case by case basis.
No normal person would think every tech company would, but our politicians are bloody idiots if we go by their history
Why do they not see that encryption can happen in any form of communication even if they do get their backdoors? Are they going to make all encryption illegal?
I’m pretty sure that’s the end-game, yes. At least as far as communication based tools go, which would include chat apps, VPN’s, cloud storage etc etc. The ruling classes in the UK are very nanny-state and genuinely believe that a persons right to privacy comes a distant second to being able to rule over us and control us more effectively.
The issue for non-UK countries is that when world governments see that its possible to pass these sort of laws, they’ll be keen to do the same. And most people are not tech-savvy, they’ll have no real idea why it’s important or invasive. It’s difficult enough to get people to switch to Signal. Imagine trying to explain why breaking encryption is a bad thing for them.
Sounds insane. Another law where the only people it affects negatively are non criminals.
Any they don’t have a key to, yes.
Wow. I was being sarcastic. That’s how stupid I think this law is. Lol
Do apple users in Europe actually use iMessage? I thought most users in the EU used Whatsapp or Signal
All the Apple users I know routinely use iMessage and WhatsApp.
Telegram or Facebook messenger/Instagram chat is what I see people use in Sweden
They use it as a secondary service with couple of peoples, everyone is on WhatsApp.
As a 40yr old Android user… I live without these apps. Hell, I might have even used them once in history…
Apple’s arrogance leads it to threaten to remove something that’s neither unique nor actually cross-platform anyway.
Did you even read the article? They are refusing to allow the British government to control the encryption standards used by the entire world. They are also not the only company to make this decision. Any company using E2EE will be affected.
No one reads the articles. They just want to be outraged, not informed.
People running their own (eg Matrix) servers outside the UK will be unaffected.
