This is the correct response. Either everyone has protection or no one has. Not that I'd trust apple anyway but by pulling the service your average person is likely to make some noise because they can feel the effect.

I wonder how many complaining here actually read even this bland and uninformative article.

At issue I believe (because it is not stated, but discussed elsewhere in better venues) is that UK wants to be able to see inside encrypted comms and files, under the guise of CSAM detection. Apple is right to oppose it.

Arguments based on hypocrisy real or perceived in other venues (china) has nothing to do with this decision its just piss-taking. Give it a rest.

There’s legitimate criticism to be made for Apple, but this is something I really appreciate about them.

The incumbent government is circling the drain and are, it seems, determined to leave a trail of destruction and burned bridges for their successors to repair.

There are a lot of things to hate about Apple, but this I can get behind. Get people using 3rd party messaging apps too! Preferably ones with e2e encryption.

God damn bullshit always "for children and terrorists"

Signal and WhatsApp have also said they'd likely leave the UK market if this bill is passed as it currently is.

I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.

Don't you know anything, Brits? Apple only strips security features for the Chinese government, you fools!

This is the way.

The one good thing I can say about apple is that they at least push back against this kind of bullshit, even if they only do so for marketing.

Those proposals will never be made law and acted upon.

It's infeasible nonsense to pander to the Daily Mail reading curtain-twitchers. They've had 13 years to try and do this. If they wanted to (and indeed if it was in any way possible), they'd have done it already.

It'll be just "Vote for us and we'll make your children safe from nonces and muzzies!" until the end of time.

I'll be damned if we'll have to thank the UK for getting RCS normalized.

Rare Apple W.

Why don't politicians just fuck off?

Nothing they ever do about anything leads to an improvement.

Why can't the UK govt simply rent their spyware from Israel, like everyone else?

They had a different response to China though. Telling.

NSA Access Only!

I can't believe I'm saying this but...good guy Apple?

They should just publicly publish all the messages from politicians' accounts.

If they want to see our messages we should be able to see theirs, fair is fair.