….or a government demanding a way in.

Even your alternative requires someone to give money to a tech conglomerate. There is no perfect alternative this late into capitalism Even if there was, it’s not realistic for millions of Apple devices around the world to suddenly be replaced.

By no means should that discourage anyone reading this from taking action to control your data better, however. I also self-host and am doing everything I can to minimize my reliance on big companies, but there are time, skill and monetary gaps there not everyone can overcome.

Apple’s choices here were:

1. Do what they did, and remove the feature for the UK only

2. Create a backdoor into their OS that can potentially be used by not just governments, but bad actors too, effectively crippling security for every single device they sell worldwide and bypassing the usefulness of on-device encryption entirely.

3. Exit the UK market, which is not realistic and would leave millions of UK customers without any further recourse than to replace their Apple devices, which is incredibly wasteful and expensive (not to mention inconvenient).

Apple chose the lesser evil. What more could you possibly expect in this situation? If you want to protest, protest the government demanding that level of surveillance on their citizens.

Yep. This is exactly what I expected them to do. They don’t want the liability of losing your data or enabling your privacy to be compromised on their devices, and the eroded trust of their customer base from that.

Unfortunately the UK put them between a rock and a hard place here. As shitty as it is, I’m glad they opted to remove the feature for only that market, rather than weaken it for everyone. It sucks, but it’s the lesser evil.

I don’t think they had any good choices here. Just like the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, they decided not to make the device’s OS inherently less secure with the inclusion of a backdoor and I can at least appreciate that much.

Yuuuup. They did him dirty multiple times.

The next candidate that pledges to adopt Bernie’s vision will easily win against whoever their opponent happens to be. That’s all Democrats ever have to do.

Trump won by swaying Tech Billionaires and campaigning directly to citizens on the platforms they use the most about the issues they cared about. As much as I hate it, it was effective af.

Assuming we ever have a legit election again, we need to look beyond the two party system, otherwise we’re just further dooming ourselves.