Apple Disables Advanced Data Protection in the UK
In the face of an unprecedented secret demand by the government of the United Kingdom to provide backdoor access to all iCloud data worldwide, Apple stood firm. Instead, the company disabled UK customers’ ability to turn on Advanced Data Protection (ADP), a feature added to iCloud in late 2022 (see “Apple’s Advanced Data Protection Gives You More Keys to iCloud Data,” 8 December 2022). ADP provides end-to-end encryption using device-based keys for most iCloud data other than email, contact, and calendar data due to the need to interoperate with external services. Apple will eventually disable ADP for all UK customers, though the process may be fraught.
The addition of ADP provided a powerful bulwark against unwanted access to private information stored on Apple’s servers. While all iCloud data is encrypted using keys that Apple possesses, it was vulnerable to government requests for data that the company could not refuse under local law. By using end-to-end encryption, ADP puts data beyond Apple’s ability to decrypt it—the company would have to build an intentional hole into the encryption system Apple could exploit to break the chain of user custody of our own data.
Apple released a carefully worded statement:
Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature. ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices. We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before. Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the United Kingdom. As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.
The UK government’s actions have not been announced but were alleged two weeks ago in reporting by the Washington Post and others. The UK Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, known by those who oppose it as the “Snoopers’ Charter,” lets the government demand companies assist in providing access to electronic information for investigations. The law also makes it a criminal offense for any company asked by the government for such information to disclose the request.
A similar provision appears in the USA/Patriot Act, which dramatically expanded the US government’s ability to spy domestically on its own citizens, something that had previously been curtailed in various ways because of the potential for abuse.
Apple’s statement carefully sidesteps the cause of its actions while revealing that it has made changes to available features. This resembles efforts that took place after the Patriot Act when some sites and organizations posted “warrant canary” pages, which indicated that no Patriot Act warrant had been received. They would remove such a page if a warrant was presented, providing “negative knowledge”—interested parties would use page-update trackers to be notified when such pages were removed. Apple included such a warrant canary in a 2013 transparency report; it disappeared in subsequent reports.
While Apple can prevent people in the UK new to ADP from enabling it, disabling the feature for existing users will be more complicated because it requires a device-based action to retrieve the encryption key and decrypt the data. No one knows how many users in the UK have enabled ADP. But I would expect that all of them will shortly receive an email that says access to ADP is ending in the United Kingdom and that they must follow a manual process to remove ADP by a given date, or their access to all iCloud information will be disabled until they comply.
If you live anywhere else in the world, consider enabling ADP now. There’s a reason the UK government is allegedly afraid of it. An infinitesimal amount of all personal data in the world relates to criminal acts—and some of that data is defined as criminal in contravention of international norms of human rights and freedom of expression. Politicians and governments, for uninformed or malicious reasons, want access to everything, violating your privacy and turning every bit into a potential way to accuse people of criminality.
ADP has a significant drawback: Apple cannot help you recover your data due to forgetfulness or catastrophe. You must make sure you never lose all your devices, that you generate and securely store a Recovery Key, and that you appoint trusted people as Recovery Contacts. ADP may cause you to fear losing your data, but it’s a sure way to lock it behind a wall so secure that no government can batter it down. The only question is whether Apple will be permitted to keep offering the features in countries other than the UK.
Mine was disabled within an hour of the announcement!
The BBC is reporting that Apple have reportedly stopped allowing users in the UK from adding Advanced Data Protection.
Corroborated:
I see Apple getting a lot of bad press over this…things like abandoning privacy and knuckling under to t(r government…but I think those are misplaced. They essentially had 3 less than optimum choices. Insert the demanded back door, abandon the UK market, or just remove ADP for those users. None of those were good choices…but just removing ADP for UK users seems t(r least bad. I don’t know whether their government will accept that as the law demands worldwide compliance…but then I don’t think the UK can demand worldwide compliance to their laws.
They have no choice but to accept it… because the “it” is no longer there. With no encryption, there is no “backdoor” needed to get the data. Essentially, the EU is saying “the law demands we have a key to your front door” and Apple has essentially just said “we don’t have doors.”
Well, there is still end to end encryption. Health data, iCloud Keychain, Messages in iCloud, and FaceTime calls remain end to end encrypted. And to be pedantic, everything else is still encrypted, but Apple also has a key to decrypt everything else (including device backups.)
I am afraid if UK government wanted to not end-to-end encrypt these data as well (especially messaging on iMessage and WhatsApp), and even removing all kinds of encryption even when paying online. Even blocking Apple Pay or Google Pay which intends to be safe payment online, so that the government can check everyone’s every second.
Simply removing ADP may be just back to Dec 2022 but the main issue is I am afraid if this is the very first step to risk innocent normal citizens to various scams and charging.
But according to what I’ve read the law applies worldwide and to non UK citizens as well…which makes no sense. That’s why I wonder what the government will think about it…because while Apple did choose the least bad alternative…in my understanding of the law they are only partially complying with it and what will the UK DoJ and courts say.
I don’t see how a law in the UK can possibly apply to everyone in the world…they don’t have jurisdiction but obviously whoever wrote the law thinks the wording justifies what they want. I guess Microsoft and Google and every other company is complying though…and I personally doubt the legality and common sense of secret orders you can’t talk about as FISA does sometimes.
Your ability to enable it?
That is what the article is about?
I’m curious how iMessage and these other data forms will be affected. iMessage can’t work without end-to-end encryption. The other data categories you note are all designed for E2EE, so there’s no “reduced security” option.
We don’t know the exact wording of the order, secret as it is, but the reporting indicates the Briitsh government was asking for a backdoor that would allow access to all iCloud data—not just that of UK citizens or residents. The appeals process for the Investigatory Act, which Apple could go through, requires first obeying the secret order before the appeals process is conducted. Seems against human rights.
Sure - I posted that to a previous thread about 24 hours before your article. Adam must have moved it.
Honestly I wonder if that was just a reporter’s bad wording, or if the communication from his source(s) was vague. As a reminder, here is the original article - gift link. As you say, we really don’t know what the UK order directed Apple to do, but it may not have literally been directing for a “backdoor” - it may have been merely that they were directing Apple to provided decrypted information whenever directed to by a UK secret warrant, and it was up to Apple whether that meant a backdoor (which is specifically a key that Apple can share that can decrypt anything) or just that Apple would have their own key that they would not need to share with the UK.
I suppose it could be argued that Apple could redesign iMessage to allow them to have a decryption key to all messages so they could decrypt when legally compelled to. Let’s hope that this change to iMessage would be communicated, though.
Also, of course, anyone who does not use Messages in iCloud and backs up their phone to iCloud and does not use ADP could have their messages extracted from the backup.
That sneaky Adam!
The BBC story quotes a so-called privacy expert who sounds exactly like a government source—and she appears to have spent half her career working for government bodies.
That’s the problem. Conceivably the UK was asking for on-demand access to any iCloud information worldwide that they would argue was related to a UK criminal investigation. Thus Apple would have to deploy a weakened, compromisable system worldwide. You can’t selectively enable/disable this kind of security hole because it’s fundamental.
Not sure if it’s against human rights but it’s certainly against common sense…and even in the UK you’re innocent until proven guilty. Obeying the order and providing the backdoor is extremely unlikely to be overturned by whatever the appeal process is so that isn’t really a very good solution.
I wonder if they actually gave any thought to drawing a line in the sand and threatening to abandon the UK market? Probably not…their revenue in 2023 was 383 billion and 95 billion of that was in the UK and abandoning 25% of your revenue doesn’t seem like prudent management of their fiduciary duties. OTOH…if they did threaten to do that maybe the uproar in the country would have gotten the requirement eliminated.
So what happens to a non-UK Apple Account holder who has ADP enabled and who enters the UK on business or holiday? Will they need to disable ADP or lose iCloud access while they’re in the UK? Does UK jurisdiction extend to say a British Airways plane in New York?
Can of worms – meet daylight!
Given that this law makes it a criminal offence for any company to disclose any such request, I can’t help wondering whether other companies that store our data have already complied without our knowledge.
No, it was enabled, now it isn’t and I am unable to re-enable it.
A small clarification: The UK is not a member of the EU.
I’m pretty sure that number is for all of Europe.
Actually, it’s ‘Europe, Middle East, Africa, and India’ so a massively larger area and population than the UK (I think India’s population is not far off China’s now?).
It looks like the government needs to be provided with a key by Apple for each account that they want to access so that they can look at iCloud backups and Notes, etc. That’s certainly not broad-spectrum trawling and I don’t think that’s the idea either. There is still no blanket backdoor access to iCloud that could be exploited by bad actors. It’s an interesting compromise.
iCloud data is still encrypted with our keys, but like adding a new device to iCloud, Apple can grant the UK government access in a somewhat similar way. Whether judicial review is necessary is not clear.
Unless you are a person of interest to the UK authorities, I can’t see that it makes much difference to us. If we in the UK were living in an authoritarian state, no doubt we would think otherwise. All online systems are leaky in one way or another, that’s the way it always has been but we choose to live with it as a matter of convenience. Each can draw the line where they feel comfortable.
However, this kind of targeted access does allow bad actors to be monitored. I can’t imagine that the current government has any desire (or the resources) to go on fishing expeditions. They must think it will be useful for law enforcement- will it?
Obviously, not using iCloud is one way around it for those who are concerned or bent but I suspect with this precedent, any cloud provider could be subject to the same order.
We can always protect sensitive documents within encrypted zip archives or sparse images and the government would then have to come to us and demand them to be made available.
You could switch to backing up devices to a Mac instead, not use notes for anything sensitive and limit the number of documents on iCloud, keeping the majority on the internal store. There are significant downsides and inconveniences, but that’s the game.
The account depends on the country they choose on App Store. When you choose one country, you have to provide the local card information. If you can’t, you can’t switch to that region.
So when those people come to the UK, their ADP is still on if the region stated on App Store is outside UK.
If someone living in the UK can choose the region outside UK (maybe he or she studies or works before and have the bank account there, or it’s where they are from which has an address or bank) their ADP can be enabled.
But closing ADP may not be the final arrangement as it may not totally satisfy the demand from the government (if they want the access to the world). And Apple on our devices just state “Apple can no longer offer ADP…”
“Can no longer…” but not something like “ADP is no longer available in the UK…”
Once you introduce a way to compromise an account without the user knowing—and I’m not sure the methods you’re describing are what’s under consideration—then these can be demanded by any government worldwide. There’s no such thing as a controlled backdoor. It becomes an exploit, whether for government use or by hackers.
Intresting! I haven’t heard a report of that yet—because of the way ADP works, there should be no method by which Apple could force disable, as you need to enter a passphrase in order to unlock the key, which they have no access to. Keep us apprised.
I’m only trying to interpret the mechanism by which Apple are giving access - we may never know exactly what is happening. We also don’t know if any other jurisdiction can request access.
I’m still not convinced that this is actually a backdoor in the sense that there is one key that unlocks the whole system - Apple don’t look like they are allowing anything like this.
I can’t quite tell if you’re talking about the situation as it is currently (ie, Apple removing encryption and making it publicly known) or as it would have been if they had acceded to the order. If the latter, per the Post article on it, the capability absolutely would have given the UK government “blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account.”
Your larger analysis is almost exactly opposite to the historical record. The UK government (and the US) has frequently, repeatedly, and continuously spied in massively broad ways without any particular focus. The European Court of Human Rights ruled against the UK government for the “unfettered harvesting and processing of millions of people’s private communications” without warrants in 2021. I’d be interested to know if – with the UK out of the EU – the UK government thinks that ruling still applies.
Whatever Apple develops to meet this spec would have compromised the whole system. You cannot have a device-based E2EE system in which there is a method by which Apple (or any party without control and access to those devices) can magically add a key without this being possible on all accounts.
Remember when the FBI asked Apple to create a special version of iOS that would allow the agency to update the San Bernardino killers’ iPhone in order to more effectively crack the phone’s code? Apple’s response remains accurate today: you can’t create a compromised system that will only ever be used once, even in a limited circumstance in which the software would have to be installed on a physical device in someone’s possession.
Because ADP relies on device-based encryption and Apple’s entire system is based on Apple having no access to key generation or storage—the keys are stored in Secure Enclave on the various devices or temporarily in Safari locally for browser-based access—they have to re-engineer their system to allow a compromise to gain access.
Whether or not that might be used against one account or a billion, it no longer matters. They have compromised the integrity of the system.
It’s a good point but how we will ever find out I don’t know. A leak or a legal challenge are probably the most likely. Being out of the EU might make us, as users, more vulnerable.
If one assumes that the objective is mass harvesting of cloud data and that Apple has allowed that kind of access, severely constricting or ending your use of iCloud is the only way forward in the short term. Our computers used to be unconnected islands of data, maybe they will revert to that model, or something like it. We have bounced back and forth between local and distributed models over the decades.
I suspect this is just the start of wider surveillance of online data in general.
Not according to the 2 pages I found…but you could be right…it does seem a bit high now that I think about it again.
This is a definitive source (note that it is common practice for US companies to use the EMEA segmentation):
The Company’s reportable segments consist of the Americas, Europe, Greater China, Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific. […] Europe includes European countries, as well as India, the Middle East and Africa.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000032019324000123/aapl-20240928.htm#i7bfbfbe54b9647b1b4ba4ff4e0aba09d_13
And for anybody interested, actual recent numbers are here:
and
I fail to see how a “back door” to encryption will be able to catch anyone other than the “less sophisticated” criminals or terrorists. The smart/organized ones will realize they could be compromised and will encrypt their data and communications using “out of band” methods. If I (like many business that use cloud storage) encrypt my data before sending it to the cloud and don’t give anyone the key except those that I want to see it, then there’s no “back door” to exploit.
The words that come to mind in this alleged mandated encryption back-door request are “security theater”, “lazy”, and “naive”.
There are a lot of those, and they present threats as well. I’m not arguing in favor of the UK law, but let’s not think that it wouldn’t be useful to a degree.
The cryptography and security researcher Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins University has a very good analysis of this issue here:
One key point is one that I figured was true: the UK government is probably not asking for a backdoor that would allow them to decrypt data themselves - it is asking Apple to create their own key that could decrypt a particular user’s data (boldface is mine):
I know that this is generally pedantic but I think it’s an important differentiation.
The European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with the EU, the UK is still a member of the Council of Europe, and it is absolutely still bound by the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights.
Okay. Would you like to assure me 100% that the UK government is adhering to the decision? Thanks!
I think the criticism is justified because Apple ultimately has betrayed its UK users, and done so with no obvious hope of a return. The UK Home Office wants more than just UK users losing access to ADP.
But I agree that it’s politically difficult to object to lawful requests without creating a straightforward antagonism between a large corporation and a sovereign and “democratically” elected government. Fortunately, I think Apple can solve this problem in a shrewd way, which both disowns responsibility for bad government, whilst respecting user privacy, and that’s to allow interoperability with other hosts of iCloud-compatible services; it would only need to concede the possibility of some revenue loss, though unlikely as much as would be incurred by simply dropping out of the UK. Here I agree with Mark Nottingham’s analysis:
In my opinion the UK government has betrayed its citizens, not Apple. Had Apple not disabled ADP for UK users they would have been required to disable ADP for everyone. At least now the rest of us have this protection.
It may be that if the UK government presses this issue then Apple may need to leave the UK market altogether so they are not subject to this regulation.
No need for sarcasm, I was simply responding to the question:
and pointing out that the UK being in the EU or not has nothing to do with the Government being bound by rulings (or ‘thinking’ they’re bound by rulings) from the ECtHR. I’m not going to get into politics but will say that in general, the UK Government does respect court decisions (including international courts), even under previous more populist governments that would have preferred to ignore them.
None of this is to defend the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 and the whole secret court system that underpins it.
Yeah, sorry, @glennf, I was condensing threads, which made the first few posts seem odd.
How does that affect US citizens with ADP activated when they travel in the UK? Will their data be open to the UK?
Here is a link to an article on Reddit that links to alternatives that allow users to set their own encryption, independent of Apple’s (or anyone else’s):
https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1iw150d/how_to_control_your_endtoend_encryption/
It refers to Cryptomator and Joplin.
Let’s see if UK owners of iPhones take on their government.
If I understood correctly ADP also prevents you from accessing your iCloud data using a web browser? Or did I misunderstand?
yep, just install cryptomator and your data is opaque once more (with the exception of your photos).
It is amazing how non-authoritarian governments are eager to install those tools that will be used and abused by later authoritarian governments.
Just take a look at how fast non-elected data pillaging gangs infiltrated the US government’s data systems…
That’s an option. I have web access turned off, but you can turn it on and off from one of your devices (Mac, iPhone, or iPad) as needed.
If there’s any betrayal of UK users going on here, it’s the UK government, not Apple. They’re the one making unreasonable demands to lower the security of their users, and making it possible for hackers to crack into Apple users accounts even if they are NOT based in the UK.
Fixing this requires voters in the UK to “throw the bastards out” and get a government that respects their citizens privacy.
Opsec is -hard- even for security experts.
Government targets are often normal people. Have a health issue or are helping someone with a health issue? That’s now illegal in much of the US. Reading the wrong books? Illegal in too many parts of the word. Repression is fast becoming the norm even in the western countries. There’s a lot I don’t like about Apple, but they seem to be the only large company that not only understands the problem, but is willing to take a lot of flak and keep trying.
I was wondering how that worked, so I looked into Apple’s documentation:
Web access and Advanced Data Protection for iCloud
If you turn on Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, web access to your data at iCloud.com will be turned off automatically to ensure your data is only available on your trusted devices. If you’d like to access your data on iCloud.com, you will first need to turn on web access. Then whenever you want to access your iCloud data, you’ll use one of your trusted devices to approve temporary access.
To access your iCloud data on the web:
After you’ve approved access from your trusted device, you can access your data at iCloud.com. For the next hour, your device will provide approval each time you access a new category of data – such as photos, notes or files. When your device provides access to a new category, you’ll receive a notification.
After an hour, you’ll need to approve from your trusted device again to access a new category of data. After you’ve accessed a category of data, you can access it until you sign out of iCloud.com or close the browsing session.
Source: Manage web access to your iCloud data – Apple Support (UK)
I think that means you need at least one trusted Apple device to unlock your iCloud data via a browser. So turning on ADP brings additional security at the risk of losing access to your data if you lose the last (or only) trusted Apple device you own (or it breaks down) if I understand correctly?
You’ve done a good job (as usual) highlighting the issues and ambiguities around Apple’s disabling ADP in the UK. As a UK iPhone user I must confess that I have deliberately not enabled ADP in the first place on account of the significant drawback you mention at the end of your article. I can imagine that there many people for whom the trade-off between convenience and security might naturally fall on the side of convenience when it comes to ADP. Should everyone rush out and enable ADP right away? Maybe not.
What would be useful is an article on moving country for an AppleId. The only info I found is Change your Apple Account country or region - Apple Support however it lacks details. It seems one needs to cancel all subscriptions (and make a note of them to pay for them again when the country has been changed), installed apps are likely to keep working but may not be reinstalled if one moves to a new device. What happens to iCloud is very unclear, does the cancelling subscription means losing all that one has in their iCloud during the transition as it’s more of an end and a new than a transition? Also as it seems one has to remove family to be able to change country it likely affects family members too.
I’ve lived in the UK, my account is set there and I have ADP enabled. I moved more than a year ago but haven’t changed the country due to all these complications and uncertainties. The situation re ADP is pushing me to consider going through it, but I haven’t been able to find good accounts of anyone having gone through it nor articles about it.
And specifically about ADP i also wonder if one has to cancel it before one can change country which would be another security concern.
You will need to wait all the subscriptions ended and have a foreign debit or credit card. After switching the region, you may not download any apps which are not available in the region you choose (some apps are even UK only).
When you say one has to wait for the subscriptions to end, I guess you mean not to lose money as otherwise it means that when Apple eventually requires ‘UK’ users with ADP to switch it off, those who can change country wouldn’t be able to do so before all their subsriptions eventually lapse. Very much not looking eventually going through this process.
Definitely why I said consider instead of go go go now now now. Sometimes, I do encourage the latter for things like OS updates with security components!
I have a whole section in my Take Control of Your Apple Account book about this because of Apple’s weak documentation.
Yes. As I note in passing at the end of the article, the big tradeoff is that you could lose access to your Apple Account forever if you lose access to 100% of your trusted devices and have no backups elsewhere of things like iCloud Photos. (I always recommend having one Mac that has full downloads enabled and offsite backups to prevent that particular scenario.)
You can enable Recovery Key and Recovery Contacts as additional ways to recover lost access. But failing those, any data not downloaded in some way to a device or backup you return and your Apple Account, its ID, associated purchases, and locked-away data is lost forever.
A back door – a “master key” in this case – is still a back door. Someone still has the ability to snoop on your data. It’s worse in this case because if the “master key” is implemented (and you can bet that Apple would be forbidden to say that they’ve developed one), you are under the false impression that your data can not be decrypted by others.
Agreed. That’s why having non-subject-matter experts (politicians/bureaucrats) make security related decisions/demands in the name of “public safety” is even more problematic. What’s the old phrase (and I’m trying to keep this somewhat clean): “the road to the underworld is paved with good intentions”?
I’d say yes. But turning on ADP requires either setting a trusted contact or adding a recovery key to your account. So losing your only trusted device would require using whichever of those methods you chose - recovery contact or recovery key - to regain access to your Apple account.
See Set up a recovery key for your Apple Account - Apple Support and Set up an account recovery contact - Apple Support
Personally I don’t worry too much about this. I have four Macs as trusted devices, in two different locations, plus my iPhone, a spare “just in case” iPhone that I travel with, and an iPad.
I have not yet set up a recovery contact - the obvious would be my wife, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I do have a recovery key and multiple ways which don’t require access to my Apple account or iCloud to access it just in case.
Note that iCloud Keychain requires that you provide the passcode to one of your trusted Apple devices in order to gain access to the keychain. Hopefully for most of us that is not a problem.
Backdoor has a specific meaning and implication in cybersecurity - it’s a method that would allow someone to bypass authentication or encryption for anything that is stored. One would say that if the UK (in this case) was demanding a backdoor that would allow them to decrypt any blob of encrypted information with just that single backdoor method. This is reportedly not what the UK government wants. What allegedly is being asked instead is that Apple be able to provide decrypted data when asked under the powers of the “snooper’s charter”. It would not be a single method, not a “master key” - Apple would (as they do with any account that does not have ADP enabled now) have their own copies of keys for any iCloud encrypted data. The UK authority would request access to all of the iCloud data for a specific iCloud account, and Apple would be able to provide the decrypted data - not a key to decrypt the encrypted blob. It’s not a single master key for all encrypted data, so if that key was leaked, it would not be useful to the person who acquired it.
As I said, it’s being pedantic to say it’s not a true backdoor - but words have meanings. What the original article in the Washington Post suggested by using that wording was that the UK would have access to all iCloud data on demand. That does not appear to be what the UK is demanding.
Also do not use iCloud for device backups (this really is what the UK intelligence agencies want - what you store in iCloud in files probably doesn’t matter as much). Also don’t sync the Notes app to iCloud, or sync contacts, or calendars, or reminders (if you want those to be secure as well.) Cryptomator would have no effect there, either
Sure. But considering that the original law was passed by a Conservative government and demands are now being made under that law by a Labour government, clearly throwing the old bums out last year changed nothing. Since a new general election doesn’t need to called for another four years, probably the best solution is the one that appears to have been used in this case: leak the details and hope to embarrass the government into forcing a retreat from this demand letter. I have a feeling that it won’t work - not enough people care about this enough to make a political difference.
Joseph Menn of the Washington Post has an update regarding the opinion of the new US director of intelligence.
https://wapo.st/41C53f5
Bruce Schneier’s take:
“There are other end-to-end encrypted cloud storage providers. Similar levels of security are available for phones and laptops. Once the UK forces Apple to break its security, actions against these other systems are sure to follow.”
And more.
This has two really bad impact:
It’s a system which is made to prevent people from changing countries for their Apple accounts. Even being able to just stop the subscriptions and lose the money paid for what remains would be better.
I thought that turning on ADP would disable web access to iCloud, full stop. I learned that Apple designed a method for trusted devices to unlock the data in the news about the UK changes. So now I’m thinking maybe I should turn ADP on.
Is there a TidBITS article that does the usual deep-dive into the pros and cons of turning on Advanced Data Protection?
India’s population overtook China’s in April 2023:
Unfortunately this links to Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another Apple Account - Apple Support which mentions as one condition:
So this can’t be used as a workaround to change country.
It seems that the only way is to create a completely new identity and either repurchase previously apps and subscriptions or switch to the older account in the AppStore with the risk that this switching may be blocked for 90 days (hasn’t happened to me so far, getting apps from three countries).
It would be great if Apple would simplify the process for those wanting to migrate their account when ADP is disabled but the number of users with UK account having moved to another country and with ADP on is likely too small for Apple to care.
It has been reported that the UK wanted not just access to UK user accounts or accounts of people in the UK, but global. But if that is true, how would turning off the ADP option for UK users alone be anywhere near sufficient to satisfy these overreaching UK demands? If I traveled to their country right now my ADP would still be active and they’d be as helpless in trying to hack into my account as before. So are they just going to roll over (“ah fish sticks and figgy pudding, guess we can’t pull a quick willy on Apple after all”) or are they going to double down? And if the latter, how would they do that and what options would Apple then have (apart from nuclear, i.e. saying goodbye to the UK market)?
I think anyone would be simply guessing. We just don’t know. As I said before: perhaps Apple is hoping that the publicity this has generated (mostly negative), plus the negative reaction from US intelligence (at least the public reaction - who knows if behind the scenes US intelligence actually wants this), will force the UK to accept this as a compromise they can live with, though if that happens I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing stories suggesting that UK intelligence services were unable to stop CSAM networks / terrorism / whatever because they lacked the intelligence that would have been available from encrypted iCloud data, because two can play the negative press game.
One possibility is for police/custom officers to force you to disable ADP when crossing the border. Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act allows police officers to detain anyone entering the UK at the border without suspicion. Not responding to their questions is a criminal offence and there’s no right to a lawyer during this detention. It is supposed to be used to foil terrorist plots but has been used discriminately against Muslims and Kurds as well as antifa and some other activists. Last time I saw its use in the news was when it was used against a French book publisher.
The Financial Times is reporting that apparently Apple is taking the UK to court to fight this clandestine backdoor nonsense. The article is behind a paywall so the best I can offer here is this MR article (released just a tad before the 9to5Mac article) about the original FT piece.
Edit: this here worked nicely to get around the paywall.
BBC news article. There will be a hearing on Friday, apparently. Bear in mind that “secret” means only “not in public”. Given that it’s announced on the national broadcaster, it’s hardly a secret any more.
And, of interest only to pedants such as me, he’s not “Lord Rabinder Singh”. If he were a peer, he’d be “Rabinder, Lord Singh”; but as he isn’t, he’s Lord Justice Singh, a judge of the Court of Appeal.
I always correct “Lady Ada Lovelace” to “Ada, Lady Lovelace.”
Also pedantically interesting is that the third Earl of Stanhope, the creator of the iron hand press in 1800 (who released it without patent), is often styled even in his own writing as Earl Stanhope, though he should properly be Charles Mahone, third Earl of Stanhope, or Charles Mahone], Earl Stanhope. Things were apparently looser in 1800!
So is the proper form of address for, say, aging rockers:
Mick, Sir Jagger
Elton, Sir John
Paul, Sir McCartney
…and how about Charles, Sir Barkley?
;-)
No. All three Britons you mention (I can’t comment on Charles Barkley, or even on Barkley Charles) are knights, not peers, and so all are correctly addressed in the vocative as Sir firstname and in the third person as Sir firstname surname.
Their wives are correctly addressed as Lady surname or as firstname, Lady surname. Unless their fathers are earls, marquesses or dukes, it is wrong to call them Lady firstname.
It really isn’t difficult.
Say the Germans about their grammer.
I like the saying that fish don’t notice water as they have been imersed in it all of their lives.
OK, enough of this discussion of grammatical pedantry. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an i.
I tried turning on ADP. It turns out you’re not allowed to if you have back-level devices attached to your account. In my case, that’s a Mojave virtual machine.
I first had to turn on a Recovery Key (but I thought I already had one, that is shorter than the new one??). Now I’m wondering if I should leave it on or turn it off. I’m thinking back to last year when Apple had a problem and all of my devices were no longer trusted.
I’ve had ADP turned on essentially since it became an option. I have not experienced any issues with it so far — at least none I’m aware of. Safari iCloud syncing is a mess (mostly iCloud tabs, sometimes also bookmarks), but that was iffy even before ADP as far as I can recall. I did have to throw a whole bunch of older systems overboard to get onto ADP, but since they mostly didn’t really rely on my specific AppleID that didn’t come at a huge cost. I just put them on a secondary AppleID I set aside for legacy systems.