UK government wants to spy on your Apple accounts, even if you're not a Brit

The UK government has secretly ordered Apple, the tech giant behind iPhones, iPads, and Macs, to create a backdoor granting access to all encrypted cloud backups worldwide.

That means, it wants a backdoor to spy on you and your iCloud accounts, even if you’re not a Brit. Joseph Menn of The Washington Post first reported on the crackdown, coming from its sources.

The demand, issued under the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act, would force Apple to let law enforcement access fully encrypted user data without informing users.

But Apple doesn’t want to do so. The Cupertino tech giant is expected to resist by removing encrypted storage from the UK, though this would not satisfy the order’s global reach.

“There is no reason why the UK should have the authority to decide for citizens of the world whether they can avail themselves of the proven security benefits that flow from end-to-end encryption,” Apple told the Parliament last year after being notified that such an order might be coming.

Apple has made security its highest selling point across its products, and the company even took jabs at its competitors like Google.

Last year, Apple’s horror-style Safari ad campaign promoted it as the “actually private” browser amid Google’s legal troubles over misleading Incognito claims and Microsoft’s PR nightmare with Recall’s security concerns, a feature on Copilot+ PCs that can recall anything you’ve done on your PCs.

Though, experts argued that it still fell short in protecting user data from law enforcement, with transparency reports back in 2022 saying that Apple complies with law enforcement data requests 90% of the time, said The Guardian.