Apple’s move was the lesser of two evils.
The original request from the UK government was for the government to have a backdoor to end-to-end encryption. Anyone who knows even a tiny bit about this technology acknowledges that there is no such thing as “backdoor access, but only for the right people”.
Furthermore, even if there were, no one is the right people. Such changes are basically security nightmares.
Knowing that such a change would impact users worldwide, Apple instead disabled Advanced Data Protection for UK users in February 2025.1 By doing so, they complied with the request without compromising encryption for everyone else.
The UK may back down on the demand.
According to the news, the UK may back down on its demand due to pressure from Washington.2 This is good news. Although most people in the privacy community would advise against using big tech or closed-source software, and would rather use open-source alternatives, the more accessible these protections are, the better.
An Apple user who has access to end-to-end encryption is better off than one who doesn’t.
Regardless, the privacy community is right: Be ungovernable.
We can’t rely on closed systems or governments to provide the privacy and security features we need. The world changes fast, and we don’t truly own most of the devices we allegedly have — corporations and governments do.
The solution? Be ungovernable. (No worries, that was the last time I’ll repeat this line, lol)
Open-source software suggestions for encrypting your data.
If you want to keep having the convenience of online services, Proton is a well-known provider offering email, calendar, drive, VPN, and a password manager.
Cryptomator encrypts your data on any cloud service, regardless of what kind of encryption (if any) they use. This eliminates the need to trust your cloud provider. It avoids the inconvenience of using offline encryption software, uploading encrypted files to the cloud, and downloading them again just to decrypt and use them. Instead, it decrypts them to a virtual drive so that you can access them right away!
Still, whether or not you use online backup solutions, you need offline backups. It’s even better if you’re the kind of person who dislikes subscriptions and using someone else’s computer no matter how secure it is. In this case, VeraCrypt comes to help. It can encrypt partitions, whole disks, or create a virtual encrypted disk that you can move around!
In my opinion, while I understand the convenience of using online services, and use them myself, the less you rely on them, the better.
Local computing is king.