Apple has secured a victory in defeating a proposed mandate from the British government that would have required the company to provide backdoor access to user data uploaded to the cloud.
The February order from the British government that mandated access to data, including encrypted data on cloud services, provoked fury from the US tech industry, which has accused the UK of Orwellian practices in policing online content.
“Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside President Trump and Vice President Vance to ensure Americans' private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected,” Tulsi Gabbard, US director of National Intelligence, announced on X on Tuesday.
“As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a 'back door' that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens.”
Technology tycoon and entrepreneur Elon Musk responded to Ms Gabbard's post with an arm flex emoji.
Mr Musk has been highly critical of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour Party over the backdoor data access policy.
Apple has not yet responded to The National's requests for a comment on this story.
According to The Washington Post, which first broke the story about the law colloquially known as the “Snoopers’ Charter”, the proposed legislation would have made it a criminal offence for a company to reveal that the government had made a request to access data.
The policy push is not unique to the UK, with police and security services around the world advocating for more access to encrypted communications in recent years, warning that encryption can benefit criminals.
For Apple, the matter has proven to be particularly sensitive, given the company's significant marketing emphasis on user privacy.
In 2016, the US-based consumer technology company challenged a federal magistrate’s order to unlock an iPhone used in the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attack.
At the time, Apple chief executive Tim Cook argued that such a move would undermine encryption by creating a backdoor that could potentially be used on other future devices.
“The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers – including tens of millions of American citizens – from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals,” he said.
“We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack.”
He added that the demand threatened the security of Apple’s customers and had “implications far beyond the legal case at hand”.
During prosecution, the FBI announced that it had found its own way to access the iPhone data for the accused terror suspects.
As far back as 2010, when Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs was still at the helm of the company, Apple was considered to be significantly more stringent than other Silicon Valley companies when it came to protecting user privacy.
“A lot of people think we're old fashioned about this,” Mr Jobs said during the D8 conference that same year. “We take privacy extremely seriously.”
Some, however, have questioned whether Apple's commitment to privacy is more style than substance, and whether it is just an attempt to sell more devices and services.
One of Apple's more prolific advertisements promoted the iPhone's various encryption settings, depicting flying surveillance cameras attempting to snoop on iPhones, only to crash and detonate.
“Privacy … that's iPhone,” the advertisement concludes.
