Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) is a privacy feature very few people have been using. Non-techies had never heard of it, and even some geeks hadn’t enabled it.
So Apple standing up to the UK government’s attack on ADP might not seem a big deal – but I’d argue that it’s way more important than it might seem, for three reasons …
The British government’s worldwide attack on ADP
We previously outlined what ADP is, and why it matters, but the executive summary is that it extends end-to-end encryption to almost all your iCloud data. That means that Apple has no access, and therefore cannot grant access to any government agencies who come knocking on its door.
ADP was introduced in 2022, and it’s fair to say that it didn’t make much of a splash. It remains off by default, so about the only people who enabled it were security-conscious geeks. Until now.
Apple effectively revealed a secret order
The repressive legislation used states that companies that receive one of these orders cannot reveal this fact. The idea is that tech companies can be forced to expose their customers’ personal data without being able to warn them of this fact.
It would have been illegal for Apple to tell the world that it has been ordered to create backdoor access to ADP. What the company cleverly did instead was announce that it was withdrawing ADP from the UK, without explaining its reason.
“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 […] 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.”
This message was crystal clear. Essentially “we cannot tell you that the British government ordered us to build a backdoor into ADP, nor that we refused.”
Additionally, we now know that Apple has appealed the secret order it’s not allowed to tell us about.
The iPhone maker has made its appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body that examines complaints against the UK security services, according to people familiar with the matter.
It’s of course not Apple who leaked information only Apple would have because that would be illegal.
Apple has made a niche feature headline news
The UK and US are two members of a key international intelligence alliance known as the Five Eyes. This is the agency which told the tech industry back in 2018 that “privacy is not absolute” and end-to-end encryption “should be rare.” These are countries who keep each other’s secrets.
But because the British government over-reached by demanding access not just to accounts owned by its own citizens, but by iCloud users worldwide, and because Apple effectively revealed the secret order without revealing the secret order, that led the US government to speak up – and to do so publicly.
Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wrote in a letter responding to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona that she was not made aware of the UK’s secret demand by her UK counterparts. However, she suggested, the UK government may have broken a bilateral privacy and surveillance agreement in making the demand.
A combination of the British government’s stupidity and Apple’s strong stance means that what was previously a niche featured used by a tiny proportion of iCloud users is now headline news.
That’s important for three reasons
First, the saga has dramatically increased public awareness of end-to-end encryption in general, and Advanced Data Protection in particular.
Second, governments around the world now know that this type of secret order – even with gagging clauses – won’t protect them from public disclosure, because Apple can be counted on to make the matter very public.
Third, it’s put the US government in a very awkward position if it too wanted to issue one of these secret orders under similar legislation of its own. It not only knows that Apple would tell us about the order without telling us about the order, but that it would be attacked for hypocrisy after criticizing the British government’s action.
Apple isn’t just standing up to the UK government, it’s standing up to all governments worldwide who might like to follow the British example.
Photo by Peter Forster on Unsplash
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