Comment by cmsj
15 days ago
Apple still has legal entities in the UK. Pulling out cloud services would be insufficient to prevent the UK authorities from interfering with their activities.
15 days ago
Apple still has legal entities in the UK. Pulling out cloud services would be insufficient to prevent the UK authorities from interfering with their activities.
> prevent the UK authorities from interfering with their activities
I'm still missing how this could be enforced ? To my layman understanding, this reads the same as if China said : "Meta, Tesla, Valve etc has entities in China therefore we get to see all data they store in the EU and the US.
The UK has Zero jurisdiction in Ireland for example where a lot of EU data may be stored.
I have lived to the day that we give an example on china not doing something stupid a western democracy does about rights and freedom. Wild times to be alive. I am also surprised that they demand worldwide access and not just UK users data or all the data stored in UK jurisdiction. But this is going too far.
China has forced Apple to outsource iCloud in China to a state run company, so all data is just directly controlled by the government there. It’s an even worse situation.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754
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It is worse than that, I never expected that most democracies would go back to foregone days, because people get sold out on populism and decided to ignore history lessons.
As a child of Portuguese revolution, I am aware of plenty of stories, apparently many folks nowadays think those are stories to scare misbehaved kids.
And if you think China and the USA and Russia wouldn't want it... hey I've got this bridge for sale.
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It can be enforced in this way: police raids the local headquarters and jail a bunch of people because their company didn't comply with the law.
The only way to prevent that is not having any local office, no employees, nothing. Sell physical objects only by the means of local 3rd party resellers which will import goods. Same thing for services. Of course they can ban imports and services or go after those 3rd parties. It depends how nasty they want to be.
I suspect the UK government would back down way before Apple. People aren’t politically active as those of years pass, but brick their iPhones you’d have a riot.
> I'm still missing how this could be enforced ?
By banning Apple from doing business in the UK.
The US used a similar strategy decades ago to break Swiss Bank Secrecy laws (either Swiss banks had to give up the info or they were going to be kicked out of the US).
> By banning Apple from doing business in the UK.
As someone else here said, Apple would 100% call this bluff. And you can be certain the UK won't have the US to put pressure on Apple for them. All the would happen is the UK Apple users would be with an expensive paperweight.
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Swiss banks didn't care - they didn't have a large Us presence anyway. Until the US started enforcing this by proxy, other banks couldn't do business with you and the US and overall the US is more important to the world than Swiss banks.
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Yep, and the US had a lot more leverage; out of the US translates into no access to US dollars either directly or via a correspondent bank, which essentially means bankruptcy.
> By banning Apple from doing business in the UK.
To use poker terminology: I think that if the UK made this bet that Apple would call.
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They ban Apple from doing business and watch as the uk stock market goes into the toilet as companies scramble to get out.
Sadly jurisdiction has nothing to do with it.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/uk-spy-base-g...
This is not just a case of the British intelligence services secretly “tapping into” Irish telephonic and internet traffic via land and maritime cables. Rather in most cases they are being provided free (or commercial) access to the information by companies associated with the use, ownership or maintenance of these cables.
Post-Snowden the Irish government retroactively legalised it...
> I'm still missing how this could be enforced ?
Basically by saying that if they don't comply, they can't do business in the UK.
There are lots of different ways to do business. UK is unlikely to be able to ban the iphone, and I doubt Apple has much business in the UK. As such they can lay off all workers in the UK "because of legal issues" and the workers feel the pain. They can still sell in the UK through third parties, and go to the EU if you need warranty work
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It is a relatively small market, and if Apple decides to shut down while flooding the streets of London with posters saying “We are forced by your government to shut down in order to uphold your privacy”, the UK Government would take a massive blow.
Imagine Russian Oligarchs on android devices! Polonium will roll, I tell you!
So if British voters get to chose between having access to iPhones or voting for a government that wants to spy on them at whatever the cost surely the choice must be clear?
The US CLOUD act says something similar to your straw man (though it doesn't ban E2E encryption like the UK is attempting to do):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Note that it the bar is having the ability to access the server, so this law is completely incompatible with most GPDR solutions: It's illegal to store European user data and then refuse to hand it over to US law enforcement, regardless of whether the data is stored in Europe or the request breaks European law.
I imagine they would fine apple a large sum of money. If apple refuse to pay they send high court sheriffs to confiscate any property they have in the UK to pay the debt.
The opposite is happening all the time - i.e. US demanding access to European data from Facebook and Google et al. It is not one-sided.
It would be enforced by fining the UK legal entities (or worse, like charging their legal representatives) if they don't comply. If the UK is serious about this, the only alternative for Apple would eventually be to completely cease operations in the UK.
By the way, this is similar to why for true GDPR compliance, data centers should be operated by EU companies that aren't subsidiaries of US companies, because even if the latter operate data centers located in the EU, they would still be bound to secret orders by the US government.
The most horrible part of the discussion we're making is that we're arguing that UK intelligence should be able to access only UK related data, and not that UK intelligence should not undermine privacy of people
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Surely if the current government were dumb enough to try and ban Apple from the UK over something like this it would it would make even Truss look competent in comparison.
Not so much because British people love their iPhones to such a extreme degree but because they willing to waste money and resources over something this stupid.
IMHO Apple could bring down the government that tried this if they really wanted to.
That's actually the only thing that would keep Apple services usable to everyone else around the world.
> By the way, this is similar to why for true GDPR compliance, data centers should be operated by EU companies that aren't subsidiaries of US companies, because even if the latter operate data centers located in the EU, they would still be bound to secret orders by the US government.
This is interesting, I know GDPR does not mandate data localization but I was under the impression that the requirements are a bit more difficult/stringent for transferring data out of the EU region ? While not perfect, it's a bit less 'open door' than it would be if it was hosted in the US.
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More importantly, apple has customers in the UK. The business from captured apple users is more valuable than apple's privacy reputation.
This all seems very similar to RIM and the aftermath of the riots in the UK. The backdoors became too obvious for customers to ignore. Did not go well for RIM in the market afterwards.
> More importantly, apple has customers in the UK. The business from captured apple users is more valuable than apple's privacy reputation.
Is it though? I wonder how much of Apple's revenue is from the UK, probably around 5-6%? Apple isn't exactly as popular in the rest of the world as they are in the US.
Would damaging their privacy reputation globally be more valuable than the UK market? I honestly don't know, but my hunch says no - they are likely to want to keep their reputation and dump the UK market. I think more likely is Apple is going to be able to get the UK to cave in. Apple is extremely competent with PR, and would be able to spin any kind of pull-out or degraded service in the UK as the government's choice and fault, to the ire of UK citizens.
Who has more to lose though? I mean any government that would do something as stupid as banning Apple because Apple didn’t allow it to spy on its citizens wouldn’t be very popular or last that long..
I mean this would be even more stupid than Partygate and the whole Truss debacle put together.