The original post: /r/privacy by /u/Substantial-Dust5513 on 2025-02-21 19:33:15.

After looking at many places on Reddit and YouTube, Me and many others have been seeing people blaming Apple for what they did in the UK. For those who weren’t catching up with the news recently, Apple was forced to give user data to the UK government, especially those with the Advanced Data Protection feature enabled. Now I want to say a few things.

  1. Apple has the legal right to challenge requests that they deem inappropriate and they have numerous times in other situations. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t. No matter what Apple does, they have to operate within the legal frameworks of the country they’re based in and other countries with valuable levels of customers, one of those countries being the UK. If Apple didn’t comply, they would have to go through legal penalties by the UK.
  2. What Apple did was better than complying to what the UK wanted from Apple. The UK demanded data from users that had enabled advanced data protection all across the world, which Apple obviously didn’t follow and instead removed Advanced Data Protection from UK users. At least the UK government wouldn’t be spying on users outside the UK thankfully.
  3. For those saying that Apple users should move to Android, guess what. Google also complies with these requests wherever they like it or not. You can degoogle phones but Google’s Android by itself is not any better in privacy than iOS. I am even an Android user myself who knows this.
  4. Nothing on the internet is 100% private. It’s simply impossible no matter how hard you try. You can react in two ways. Either give up on privacy which is what most people do unfortunately OR you can adapt to your online privacy and make decisions between convenience and security that lies in your threat model to make sure you limit the risk of you getting into a dodgy situation where something or someone breaches your digital life. This means you do not put all your eggs in one basket and use strong unique passwords with safe and secure 2FA. This is the thing that gets people in trouble the most when they don’t follow any of these critical security steps.

It’s normal to care about this situation and I do too. But if anyone here is to blame for this situation, it would be the UK government, not Apple.

The best you can do is try to use separation of powers so Apple doesn’t control your entire digital life for those in the UK, like myself.