- Apple’s appeal against the British government to be heard secretly
- The technology giant is fighting against a request to build a back door in its encryption
- We tuned Techradar -users to their thoughts – here is what you said
It is likely that Apple’s legal appeal against the British government will be heard during a secret hearing at High Court, the BBC reports after Apple’s promise to ‘never build a back door.’
Apple recently drew its end-to-end encryption service, Advanced Data Protection (ADP) from UK devices at an alleged request from the British government to build a back door in the encryption, giving access to law enforcement authorities.
When we wait for the result of the appeal, we asked our Techradar readers their thoughts through our WhatsApp channel (if you are interested, you can join here) -and the results may surprise you …
The results are in
When asked, “Do you want your government to have access” to private encrypted data, our readers voted overwhelming in favor of Apple’s decision, where 67% chose the opportunity “My data is private – I didn’t want my government to have access”.
A small number of our readers (8%) said they had no problem with their government having a master key for their encryption, choosing the opportunity, “I wouldn’t care as I have nothing to hide” – but a quarter of respondents thought that law enforcement should only have access in extreme circumstances.
The US Director of National Intelligence called the request a ‘clear and eerie violation of US privacy and bourgeois freedoms’, as the request would have extraterritorial powers – sparkling ‘serious concern’ not only for privacy, but for fear that this would “open a serious vulnerability to cyber utilization of reluctant actors”.
Tech Giant’s appeal must be considered by the Court of Investigation Powers, which is an independent court with the power to investigate claims against the British intelligence services.
“There is no easy answer to this conundrum,” said Matt Aldridge, Senior Principal Solutions Consultant at OpentExt Cybersecurity.
“Either a system has” trust in no “end-to-end encryption, or it doesn’t, there are no half-way here, so Apple takes a pragmatic approach by removing the service for British users, rather than effectively putting a back door in their systems that could affect privacy for their over 1 billion other users around the world.”
