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UK law that could ban Apple security updates worldwide is an unprecedented overreach (9to5mac.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

UK law that could ban Apple security updates worldwide is an unprecedented overreach::Proposed amendments to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) which could ban Apple security updates worldwide are an “unprecedented overreach,”...

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (3 children)

As far as I can see, this law only requires Apple to inform the government of upcoming updates that might interfere with government tracking/5-eyes bs.

Certainly still an utterly shit rule that should 100% be ignored, but nothing about banning security patches worldwide.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

That's how the UK is framing it, "oh, it doesn't give us the power to block anything, Apple is just over reacting".

They already have the power to block things from the Investigatory Powers Act 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

From the OP's article:

The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) actually implemented many of the proposed powers, including granting the government the power to issue orders to tech companies to break encryption by building backdoors into their products. Apple strongly objected to this at the time.

So with this, they would now have the advance notice needed to actually block updates where before Apple could just release an update and by then it was too late for the UK to do anything about.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If it were me, I would just send them an all release notes for every product all the time. I'm sure that it shouldn't be up to Apple to decide what does and doesn't count as interference.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Yeah, like is Apple even supposed to know what bugs etc government agencies are using?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

No there’s teeth to this law. They have to wait for the government to “review” the change before it can be deployed. And the government can order them not to make the change.

The guardrails are basically “if it might hamper intelligence or police work, we can reject it”.

As an example Apple has been doing foundation work that will likely lead to photos having similar protection to passwords. Photos are obviously incredibly valuable for spooks and cops since most photos have location metadata and face recognition.

They could easily reject that change.