Two-tier encryption in the UK

In one line

Alice and Bill have identical iPhones. Only one gets Apple’s strongest iCloud protection.

Opening excerpt

Here’s something odd. Alice and Bill both live in the UK. Both have identical iPhones. Both use iCloud. Both pay Apple for the same services. Alice has Advanced Data Protection switched on, protecting the majority of her iCloud data. Bill doesn’t, and can’t switch it on. Alice enabled it before Apple withdrew the feature for new UK users in February 2025. Bill missed the window.

To understand how this happened, we need to go back over a decade to the aftermath of the Snowden/NSA revelations surrounding PRISM . In January 2014, Tim Cook was interviewed by David Muir for ABC News . Cook said, “We have a gag order on us right now,” but clarified, “there is no back door. The government doesn’t have access to our servers. They would have to cart us out in a box for that… we feel that strongly about it.”

Nearly two years later, on the 2nd of December 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik carried out the San Bernardino terrorist attack , killing 14 people and wounding 22. The FBI obtained the iPhone 5C that had been used by Farook.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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