Also not realistic. Even if the UK government didn’t perceive that as fraud, Apple accounts (and most other businesses’ accounts) are region-locked and cannot be transferred elsewhere to prevent going around laws in this way.

This means that every user would also need to make new Apple accounts in their new country of choice and give up any purchases/subscriptions/data in their UK accounts. And possibly need new out of country phone numbers and service as well.

….or a government demanding a way in.

Even your alternative requires someone to give money to a tech conglomerate. There is no perfect alternative this late into capitalism Even if there was, it’s not realistic for millions of Apple devices around the world to suddenly be replaced.

By no means should that discourage anyone reading this from taking action to control your data better, however. I also self-host and am doing everything I can to minimize my reliance on big companies, but there are time, skill and monetary gaps there not everyone can overcome.

Apple’s choices here were:

1. Do what they did, and remove the feature for the UK only

2. Create a backdoor into their OS that can potentially be used by not just governments, but bad actors too, effectively crippling security for every single device they sell worldwide and bypassing the usefulness of on-device encryption entirely.

3. Exit the UK market, which is not realistic and would leave millions of UK customers without any further recourse than to replace their Apple devices, which is incredibly wasteful and expensive (not to mention inconvenient).

Apple chose the lesser evil. What more could you possibly expect in this situation? If you want to protest, protest the government demanding that level of surveillance on their citizens.

Yep. This is exactly what I expected them to do. They don’t want the liability of losing your data or enabling your privacy to be compromised on their devices, and the eroded trust of their customer base from that.

Unfortunately the UK put them between a rock and a hard place here. As shitty as it is, I’m glad they opted to remove the feature for only that market, rather than weaken it for everyone. It sucks, but it’s the lesser evil.

I don’t think they had any good choices here. Just like the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, they decided not to make the device’s OS inherently less secure with the inclusion of a backdoor and I can at least appreciate that much.

Democracy manifest (how is this not already linked???)

Runner-up