Apple has said planned changes to British surveillance laws could affect iPhone users’ privacy by forcing it to withdraw security features, which could ultimately lead to the closure of services such as FaceTime and iMessage in the UK.
Everyone commeting here saying “good, we will switch to X” is absolutely stupid. This law means no iMessage, no Signal, no WhatsApp, no Telegram, no secure encrypted messaging for anyone.
Great! If you’re technical and not have iOS. That’s already 50% of British market not using it.
Besides, it won’t help you if that’s a government mandate, and Google will be forced to take it down for the UK market from the store. Not a lot of people are installing apps from outside the Play Store.
Too bad if people arent willing to adapt. I guess you’ll just have to use paper notes and face to face contact, or whatever app your government makes. /S
Okay, try explaining it to my 51 years old father. Or someone who really isn’t into tech in general.
Federated stuff will work for you and I - technically knowledgeable people. But we are a tiny fraction of population. The success of WhatsApp lays in its super simplicity.
It seems easy, but the moment you ask the user to “choose their instance” - you already push away a lot of untechnical people. What is an instance? How do I know which one is good? Will I be able to talk to people on other instances (look at Lemmy, some instances are blocked by other instances)? Why do I even have to choose an instance?
From an UX standpoint, that’s a disaster. Stuff like Lemmy or Mastodon will remain forever a niche, because of that.
Yeah, don’t tell your grandpa to pick an instance. Just link him straight to the registration page. Solved.
Lemmy is the same. Facebook is the same. You don’t need to tell a user that their Facebook account is going to be shared by their geography. That doesn’t matter.
Just link then to the registration page for the instance that you use. Easy.
Did you even read the article? They are refusing to allow the British government to control the encryption standards used by the entire world. They are also not the only company to make this decision. Any company using E2EE will be affected.
I think you underestimate the deep stupidity and tech-ignorance of our politicians, coupled with their burning desire to know everything that we do. This is a set of people who think hidden == illegal.
This is a set of people who think hidden == illegal.
This is a fundamental shift in mentality that has occurred over the last 30 years and it’s startling how many average people have bought in. There doesn’t need to be a reason for something to be legal, rather there needs to be a compelling reason for it not to be. People have stopped viewing freedom as fundamental right, but rather as something granted to them by the government on a case by case basis.
Why do they not see that encryption can happen in any form of communication even if they do get their backdoors? Are they going to make all encryption illegal?
I’m pretty sure that’s the end-game, yes. At least as far as communication based tools go, which would include chat apps, VPN’s, cloud storage etc etc. The ruling classes in the UK are very nanny-state and genuinely believe that a persons right to privacy comes a distant second to being able to rule over us and control us more effectively.
The issue for non-UK countries is that when world governments see that its possible to pass these sort of laws, they’ll be keen to do the same. And most people are not tech-savvy, they’ll have no real idea why it’s important or invasive. It’s difficult enough to get people to switch to Signal. Imagine trying to explain why breaking encryption is a bad thing for them.
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