The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online.
> Now every force in the country has a team sifting through people’s posts trying to determine what crosses an undefined threshold. “It is a complete nightmare,” one officer admits
12k a year?!? That is a staggering number. I wonder what the stats were in East Germany (though they may have had harsher punishments.. that can be ratcheted up later though once the system is in place)
duxup · 4h ago
I really sort of expected that by the time I reached my age that we'd have more policy makers that understood tech a little better. I feel like in the last say 25 or more years ... the needle hasn't moved.
setgree · 4h ago
This article is explicitly about how J.D. Vance (age 40) & others at the White House are forcefully advocating for preserving E2E encryption. Arguably not for the right reasons, but still.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
pyrale · 4h ago
They are forcefully pushing for whatever the position of US companies is in conflicts between US companies and EU regulators.
The position of the US executive on encryption is well summarized by the Lavabit case.
GeekyBear · 3h ago
The U.S. also attempted to force Apple to add a back door just a decade ago.
> Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, which has been ordered to help the F.B.I. get into the cell phone of the San Bernardino shooters, wrote in an angry open letter this week that "the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create." The second part of that formulation has rightly received a great deal of attention: Should a back door be built into devices that are used for encrypted communications?
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
Apple's hidden at least one warrantless backdoor in their systems for the purpose of federal surveillance. I have no reason to believe the exploitation stops there.
reactordev · 3h ago
If you think law enforcement doesn’t have access to your iPhone, you’re sorely mistaken. I’m not at liberty to explain but there are companies that can extract your smartphone contacts, messages, cell phone call logs, voicemails, apps, and emails. Law enforcement has been using them for a while now.
jrockway · 3h ago
I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Our emails have literally been used to target ads at us since like 2006. Cell phone carriers are happy to mine voicemail, call logs, SMS, etc. in the hopes of finding a revenue stream that doesn't involve them having to do irritating work like running fiber to cell phone towers.
This leaves contact mining as the odd one out, but given how many apps want to see your contacts, you know that those are being sold by at least one of those apps.
None of this stuff has ever been end-to-end encrypted, so there can't be any way people expect it to be private.
echelon_musk · 3h ago
With physical access to the device or not?
GeekyBear · 3h ago
No-one is surprised by the existence of the security arms race.
It's the reason that Apple and Google recently started rebooting devices that haven't been unlocked in a while.
That's old patched spyware. I'm talking about something entirely different. No device install needed.
andrepd · 2h ago
Emails and GSM calls yes, obviously. But e.g. Signal communications? You need a Pegasus-tier exploit for that, which means that unless you're high profile enough you should be safe.
idiotsecant · 2h ago
You're 'not at liberty' to post wikipedia links? Or you have knowledge of programs wikipedia doesn't?
reactordev · 2h ago
The latter. Wikipedia doesn’t know everything. NDA’s are enforceable.
Silhouette · 2h ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you really have access to secret information of that significance and you really are under an NDA that prohibits you from talking about it then why are you casually posting innuendo about it on HN?
reactordev · 2h ago
To point out that your data isn't safe from law enforcement. Quite the contrary. I think everyone should be aware of the state we are in. And while I can't go into detail about how I know, I want others to be aware that anything on their devices is fair game. Now a day's with or without a warrant. Three letter agencies are operating with impunity. Using this very tech.
Silhouette · 2h ago
Again - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's no secret that there are groups actively looking for new exploits and that sometimes vulnerabilities are discovered that become zero days. It's a good bet that police and security services take an active interest in those vulnerabilities when they are found.
But that's very different to claiming the police can easily unlock any device any time they want to and there is a range of private companies around who provide that service to them.
Spooky23 · 1h ago
There’s nothing extraordinary about the implications of what was said.
Silhouette · 30m ago
There is nothing extraordinary about a claim that multiple commercial organisations routinely and reliably defeat the security of modern devices on behalf of law enforcement - something that would clearly undermine numerous public claims about the security and privacy of those devices made by their manufacturer? You and I have very different ideas of what is extraordinary!
bigyabai · 1h ago
It's not extraordinary at all. Ron Wyden, a US Senator subject to special briefings, basically repeated the same thing when asked about federal backdoors:
"As with all of the other information these companies store for or about their users, because Apple and Google deliver push notification data, they can be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information," Wyden wrote.
There are a lot of things that are publicly known but if he's signed an NDA he can't point at them or acknowledge their authenticity. Anyway Pegasus isn't even the correct ballpark lol.
hobs · 3h ago
I mean Cellebrite has been a public name for a long time now, and LEO pays for that and similar devices which basically launder zero days and physical exploits to get your stuff.
reactordev · 3h ago
Correct, they are one known actor...
Spooky23 · 1h ago
You need to think about what they don’t say with these matters.
He said Apple does not have and won’t create a backdoor. That was well crafted and means exactly what he said, any implicit meaning is an artifact of your brain.
BuildTheRobots · 22m ago
I might postulate that while Rhubarb LTD absolutely doesn't hold and will never create a backdoor, Celery Inc does. Ignore the fact that Celery is staffed by some of Rhubarb's senior engineers working part time. Ignore the fact Celery are contracted to do security assessments so have access to all the source code, radio firmware and schematics...
I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...
There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.
patrickmcnamara · 3h ago
The UK is not in the EU.
blitzar · 3h ago
The UK left the EU so we could persue a far stuipider set of regulations.
FirmwareBurner · 3h ago
UK: "Parkour!"
pyrale · 1h ago
Close enough :)
Zak · 3h ago
The position of the US executive on encryption can easily shift depending on who holds the presidency and certain cabinet positions. I'm not sure the Trump administration actually has a coherent position on the subject.
bsimpson · 3h ago
> I'm not sure the Trump administration actually has a coherent position
That seems to be the most salient property of his presidency. His position on any issue is whatever he just said, with no regard to what it might have been yesterday.
freedomben · 2h ago
For anyone that wants a good (and fair) example of this, check out his positions on the debt ceiling going back to 2012 (and then on every time it's come up since). When he isn't in power raising the debt ceiling is Unamerican, a political ploy and bad. When he is in power, it should be scrapped entirely and should be above politics. He was remarkably frank about it in an interview a year or two ago when he was running for president when he was pressed by the interviewer about the flip-flop, he smiled and said approximately "I wasn't running for president back then"
caycep · 19m ago
UK has a hx of pushing this - OP probably referring to efforts by the brits to put backdoors in comm standards like GSM and others back in the 80's and 90's
upofadown · 54m ago
It's possible that their advocacy is well thought out but not based on the stated reasons. Say, Apple is actually under the control of the NSA and there are hidden back doors in the form of exploitable weaknesses as per Crypto AG. Then preventing the introduction of public backdoors would preserve the value of the current setup where Apple is widely considered trustworthy with respect to their customers.
rPlayer6554 · 4h ago
> In a combative speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance argued that free speech and democracy were threatened by European elites.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
I think that’s exactly why I want encryption.
dev_l1x_be · 2h ago
And also about who is really running the show in the UK.
Spivak · 4h ago
Hey, even the worst person in the world is owed their right to privacy. Determining if someone is doing evil with their right necessarily undermines privacy for everyone.
petre · 4h ago
I'm sure the police can catch child abusers the old fashioned way: by infiltrating cp networks and posing as kids online. This snooper's charter is in fact overreach and an invitation to build something like the Stasi.
standardUser · 3h ago
If devoted half the resources to catching child abusers as we do to stop people from getting high after work, we'd have a whole hell of a lot fewer abused children. But, priorities!
thaumasiotes · 2h ago
> If devoted half the resources to catching child abusers as we do to stop people from getting high after work, we'd have a whole hell of a lot fewer abused children.
There are two problems here:
(1) We devote more resources to catching child abusers. There are all kinds of legal "if you see something, say something" requirements that make every doctor, nurse, and schoolteacher in the country part of the effort to do this.
(2) I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections. There are many, many circumstances where you're free to devote double the resources to something, but you'll see at best a trivial improvement in results.
standardUser · 1h ago
> We devote more resources to catching child abusers.
You make this statement but provide no evidence. Because there's laws on the books, we "devote more resource" than, say the entire DEA, which unlike these laws has a gargantuan budget? That's nonsense.
> I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections.
Look harder? Read up on the topic? String operations work. More would work more often and catch more abusers.
Let alone the resources we could be pouring into children's mental health services (instead of kicking families off health insurance like the current administration has accomplished).
throwmeaway222 · 3h ago
not after we find him
kingkawn · 2h ago
because Vance and his colleagues are breaking federal law for the retention of government records and as long as they don’t invite anymore journalists into the group chat they will get away with it
fluidcruft · 1h ago
Well duh how do backdoors benefit Thiel?
bsimpson · 3h ago
He's proven himself to be more of an asshat than I'd hoped (see the Zelenskyy meeting), but he did come up in Silicon Valley venture capital. There's a lot about this administration that causes concern, but I'm glad to see him on the right side of encryption.
monetus · 1h ago
It feels like hearing Diddy advocate for various legalized recreational drugs, sadly.
duxup · 4h ago
They're arguing with foreign countries. Meanwhile the federal government continuously working consolidate all data available under groups like DODGE or ICE or Palantir. Arguing to preserve a tech in a given situation but with other goals ... not sure the first part matters at that point.
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
scarface_74 · 4h ago
While Palantir is a private company and shouldn’t have access to government data, why shouldn’t in theory all government data be accessible to the government?
DOGE is clearly operating illegally for other reasons - not distributions funds that were appropriated by Congress for instance. But data sharing isn’t the root issue. It’s spineless Republicans in Congress and a sycophantic Supreme Court.
And it’s possible to say both that if you are here illegally you should be deported and that it’s currently being driven by animus, cruelty and it should be easier to obtain legal residency especially in areas where we do need more workers and implement another program like Reagan did in the 80s
strbean · 2h ago
Different data requires different access controls, and government agencies that collect / deal with a given piece of data on a regular basis are equipped to enforce those access controls.
You don't want your local dog catcher to be able to look at your medicare records just because "he's the government, and medicare records are government data".
duxup · 4h ago
I feel like you answered much of your own questions.
Beyond that many of the departments that this data is being extracted from have rules about who can access (no not everyone in the IRS has free reign) and what they can do with it. For good reason, IRS's job is to focus on what the law says they should do, not say punish political enemies and so on.
But transfer it to DODGE, ICE, Palantir, there are no laws at all regarding what they can do with that data.
scarface_74 · 3h ago
The problem is the laws - not the data sharing.
In some countries, tax data is available to everyone. Norway, Finland and Sweden in particular. There may be others
duxup · 3h ago
They're not just gathering IRS data. I'm not sure you read what I wrote at all.
carlosjobim · 1h ago
> While Palantir is a private company and shouldn’t have access to government data, why shouldn’t in theory all government data be accessible to the government?
Shouldn't everybody have access to government data, with a few exceptions?
alexey-salmin · 2h ago
I think this is a very dangerous deception. They understand.
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
DrBazza · 2h ago
Sadly, UK Parliament is made up of political careerists and art students, which is probably similar to most Western democracies. There's a saying 'those who can do, those who can't teach', it probably needs a final 'and those that can't teach, go into politics'.
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
The most popular subjects for MPs who won seats in the Dec 2019 election
Politics - 20%
History - 13%
Law -12%
Economics - 10%
Philosophy - 6%
English - 4%
eamonnsullivan · 2h ago
I'm a principal software engineer with a degree in history. You don't need a science degree to understand most of these issues sufficiently to legislate them. But you need humility and a willingness to learn. That, sadly, is lacking in too many governments and civil services.
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Silhouette · 2h ago
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Surely some of them understand the technical details. That doesn't necessarily mean they understand or respect the wider implications of a policy. This is why it's important to have a government that sets policy - taking into account all of the competing influences and potential consequences - and politically neutral technicians who then implement government policy.
No-one would dispute that if the government could examine every communication everyone ever sends then it could catch more very bad people and prevent more harm to innocent people. The problem is all the other stuff that also happens if you give a government that kind of power over its own people.
tonyedgecombe · 2h ago
The leader of the opposition studied computer engineering (before going on to law). Sadly she used the knowledge gained to hack the website of the deputy leader of Labour Party.
sealeck · 1h ago
> Sadly she used the knowledge gained to hack the website of the deputy leader of Labour Party.
If by "hack" you mean she guessed the password, then yes.
ryanmcbride · 4h ago
Yeah unfortunately we live in a gerontocracy so it's the same people in charge today that were 25 years ago :(
pjc50 · 4h ago
UK not quite as bad as the US age wise, but the real issue is the media who demand all sorts of illiberal things.
Rupert Murdoch is 94.
hinkley · 4h ago
And living on pure spite.
dv_dt · 4h ago
I think this illustrates that in the UK its that the plutocrats like Murdoch are still the same people as 25 years ago
ThatMedicIsASpy · 3h ago
A reason why my first vote ever (20 years ago) went to the pirate party.
We needed people with digital understanding 30 years ago.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland" Angela Merkel (2013) during a press conference with Obama.
"The internet is uncharted territory for us"
Hypergraphe · 4h ago
I don't think it is a matter of really understanding the tech. It has to do more about how you envision the society regarding privacy and individual rights. It is indeed a political point of view on how much you want to control everything.
petre · 3h ago
Larry Wllison is advocating the same invasion if privacy mechanisms or worse and he clearly understands the tech.
jackgavigan · 1h ago
We've had a serious problem with policy-making in this country for a loooooong time, stretching right back to when RIPA was drafted, nearly three decades ago.
They do understand the tech. They understand that allowing everyone to use E2E encryption gives them less power.
ubermonkey · 2h ago
I don't think it's that nefarious. I mean, for some of them it might be, but for MOST of them they see a "law & order" issue that will resonate with stupid people ("cops can't get access to terrorist data / child molester info / human trafficking communications!"), and they just run with it without regard to downstream effects.
snarf21 · 1h ago
I think the ironic thing is that although everyone uses powerful technology on a practically constant basis, it is sooooo much more complicated that less and less people have even a clue. How many adults would know how to change their oil today versus back in the 70s? Changing spark plugs used to be a 30 minute task but now you have to take apart half the engine just to even gain access. Even though of us who make our living in tech are not immune. How would we verify that there isn't spyware or similar in the firmware or hardware on the computer we use daily?
fyrn_ · 3h ago
Part of that is US policy makers have barely changed, they are just older now. Very troubling trend that.
dragonwriter · 3h ago
Policy makers change frequently and often radically. Federal lawmakers less so, but lawmakers are a small subset of policymakers, and not the ones who create international pressure; those are political appointees in the executive branch, and they change frequently.
ferguess_k · 2h ago
It has always been politics, not technology. Politicians and bureaucratic always want more power, and they rarely relinquish power they gained temporarily.
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
xwowsersx · 1h ago
I mean, yes many policymakers still struggle with the nuances of modern tech, but claiming that "the needle hasn't moved" in 25 years is an exaggeration. In the late 90s/early 2000s, encryption debates featured lawmakers who barely understood email. Since then, there are committees focused specifically on tech policy, even some lawmakers with backgrounds in CS or cybersecurity... and far more nuanced public debates about encryption, surveillance, and privacy.
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
xhkkffbf · 4h ago
It does seem to me like the US Vice President is advancing a pretty tech savvy policy. He's pushing for privacy. Am I missing something?
ascorbic · 1h ago
I think the non tech savvy policy makers in question are the British ones.
lenerdenator · 4h ago
He's associated with Palantir. He can't be pushing for privacy.
kstrauser · 3h ago
Sure he can. In an ideal world (from the US gov't's perspective), all communications everywhere would be encrypted, and only they'd have the workarounds to access the data anyway.
I'm not being sarcastic. For real, what major government wouldn't want that in their favor?
lenerdenator · 2h ago
They have to know that there's no monopoly on those workarounds.
Unless they're even more hubristic than we imagined.
kstrauser · 2h ago
Even if other nations have access to the plaintext, that beats all nations having that access.
lenerdenator · 2h ago
I don't think they much care about all nations.
They care about maybe a maximum of five having that access, and I'm sure they realize that #1 on that list (PRC) won't need much time to become a peer on any given technology.
f4c39012 · 3h ago
i read from this that he wants US control, nothing to do with privacy
duxup · 4h ago
I feel like the federal government continuously consolidating all data available under groups like DODGE or ICE or Palantir is about as anti privacy as it gets.
scarface_74 · 4h ago
The people in office now were already old by the time the Internet and especially Mobile took off.
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
nemomarx · 3h ago
There was a very idealistic move in education to believe that younger students would be "digital natives" and self taught on typing, computer programs, etc. So we deemphasized classes on this, and now kids grow up on consumption oriented devices and can't type again. So it goes in circles I guess
rightbyte · 3h ago
I think idealistic is the wrong wording. Maybe optimistic or naive?
nemomarx · 3h ago
Optimistic is probably the kindest, yeah. I don't think it was strictly a bad argument - it was easy to think of the classes as outdated and taught by a generation who knew less than the students. It just turned out to be a very short state of affairs. Hard to expect schools to have predicted the iPhone, right?
kypro · 2h ago
I thought this too, but I think we misunderstood the extent to which various calls for censoring and regulating the internet where driven by a lack of understanding of the technology...
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
thatguy0900 · 2h ago
You'd have to convince politicians they shouldn't be trying to die of old age in office before we started getting people who know tech
thewebguyd · 2h ago
> before we started getting people who know tech
reply
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
CJefferson · 3h ago
I don't see why you think they don't understand the tech.
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
ryukafalz · 3h ago
But also for the first time in human history, it's possible to do large-scale surveillance without large-scale human effort. The power of the network goes both ways.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
CJefferson · 46m ago
I agree, there are many complex issues involved here. But I get annoyed at tech people (not saying you!) that it is self-evident that any kind of law enforcement methods of access is obviously wrong.
varispeed · 2h ago
They understand the tech and so their advisers. You are assuming they want to do some do gooding in some sorts of naive and clumsy matter. No. They want control and they know perfectly well the implications.
omeid2 · 4h ago
Your subtle idea that the comprehension and understanding is the shortcoming of political apparatus is overlooks the million issues as basic healthcare not being addressed. The problem is not understanding, I can assure you of that.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos · 4h ago
In the distant past technical skill and knowledge was increasing as more and more people used personal computers. Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.
FirmwareBurner · 3h ago
>Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
pests · 3h ago
It’s a difference in kind I think. Creation of any type of work - art, writing, programming, modeling, deep research, etc is much more accessible on a PC than on a smartphone. Not only because of the input devices available, but also the restrictions of the platform and OS.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation.
When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together” just to open MSPaint and create shitty drawings. I don’t see anything similar today.
FirmwareBurner · 3h ago
>the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation
Ever take photos or videos with your phone? Is that not creation?
>When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together”
Same, but this is more "old man yells at clouds". Children today have their own way of creation, now using AI.
caycep · 20m ago
I don't get why the UK always does this. it's like GSM encryption all over again. Is it a particularly snoop-ey culture stemming from GCHQ or something?
snickerbockers · 4h ago
> The UK official added, this “limits what we’re able to do in the future, particularly in relation to AI regulation.” The Labour government has delayed plans for AI legislation until after May next year.
What did they mean by this
doublerabbit · 2h ago
The UK AI bill included a proposal to create an AI authority, forcing third party to align with their approaches to AI.
They've been looking to use AI for consumer surveillance; AI user monitoring essentially.
"We can't have a backdoor so we can't use AI to monitor the user"
jagged-chisel · 2h ago
AI and encryption are technically orthogonal. But they’ll use any guise to further their agenda.
chatmasta · 1h ago
They’re closely related for some use cases, like client-side content screening. If they can’t have a backdoor then maybe they’ll push for a local LLM to spy on the user’s activity and phone home when it sees something bad.
jonplackett · 4h ago
I assumed they’d only have asked for it if they’d already OKed it with the US, and that it was probably part of a plan to give US access too via 5-eyes sharing.
Turns out it was not 4D chess after all…
pjc50 · 4h ago
The UK home office has really, really wanted this for decades, through all sorts of technologies. Institutional paranoia.
lenerdenator · 4h ago
That surprises me, honestly. Makes you wonder what the British government got in return for forgetting about the encryption loicence idea.
harvey9 · 4h ago
Probably nothing. they have neither leverage nor negotiating talent.
Things got so out of control because the UK doesn't have heavily muscled tech emporiums that can spend time in bed with their politicians. US does. But it's a sad world the one where citizens are so helpless against their governments and the corporations.
thewebguyd · 2h ago
> But it's a sad world the one where citizens are so helpless against their governments and the corporations.
Helpless indeed - but, government still requires the consent of the governed. It's just that we are all very comfortable, with a lot to lose and easily distracted, so that consent to be governed is too easily given nowadays.
If we do anything together as a society it should be making sure to preserve E2E Encryption as it's one of the most important tools to organize a resistance should we wish to revoke our consent to be governed.
jjani · 2h ago
> Apple did not respond to a request for comment. “We have never built a back door or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” Apple said in February.
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
ok123456 · 2h ago
"We have never built." ok, so then who built it?
bhelkey · 2h ago
Apple stores Chinese users' iCloud data and encryption keys to that data in China in a datacenter run by a state owned firm [1].
Basically, there is no backdoor. The front door is wide open, the government just needs to ask. Or not even that -- just take whatever they need themselves.
mzajc · 2h ago
> This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap
Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
dvtkrlbs · 1h ago
I mean they just disabled advanced data protection which allowed normal law enforcement requests to access the data since they are not e2e encrypted if you don't use advanced data protection. I really don't think they needed to implement a new backdoor. They would just need implement a procedure that would fast track UK requests.
kingkawn · 2h ago
They may not have built it, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t implement something built for them.
MortyWaves · 4h ago
Thank goodness for that - a UK citizen.
crmd · 1h ago
I’m struggling to square Vance and the administration’s position here with the fact that the US IC uses GCHQ to collect on US persons since they’re not allowed to do so directly. Why wouldn’t they want it to be easier for NSA to spy on Americans?
bobthepanda · 59m ago
They probably already have a backdoor, and making one known and easy to access by UK provides an opening for other adversaries to spy on American iPhones.
cbeach · 1h ago
Say what you will about JD Vance but he has passionately confronted the European elites on their surveillance overreach and clearly it's had an impact.
We may not like everything about the current American administration, but credit where due.
drnick1 · 3h ago
What this type of news shows is that you really can't trust any government or company with your data. So don't give them any data -- only store data on your own hardware and set up your own servers if you really need a "cloud" for your data.
mass_and_energy · 1h ago
"Last month, Meta-owned WhatsApp said it would join Apple’s legal challenge, in a rare collaboration between the Silicon Valley rivals".
Apple makes home computers, mobile devices, AV equipment and productivity/multimedia software.
Meta makes social media platforms, and vr headsets. What exactly makes them "rivals"? WhatsApp vs iMessage? They're two big companies in the same sector, sure, but do they really compete against each other in a major way?
sylware · 4h ago
UK does not want to pay for US backdoor access?
wkat4242 · 4h ago
Paid backdoor access is kinda risky though, make sure to do it safely!
inglor_cz · 3h ago
The EU has similar nefarious plans as well, under the Orwellian name "ProtectEU".
I wonder how this clash is going to turn up. I would hate this development. This proposal is worthy of the Chinese Communist Party, and I am aghast just how many member states are fine with the concept of a preemptive surveillance state and breaking privacy left and right.
Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??) She already has a reputation from her career in German politics, having earned the nickname Zensursula (censoring Ursula).
mschuster91 · 3h ago
> Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??)
To answer your question: because the Conservatives just couldn't be arsed to put up an alternative.
inglor_cz · 2h ago
UvdL is the last remnant of Merkel's era, her only qualification for such a high job was her blind loyalty to Mutti.
IIRC current Kanzler, Friedrich Merz, is not at all her friend and will complicate things for her on purpose. So we will see.
scarface_74 · 4h ago
I’m by no means a Trump fan. But I thought it was negligent how the Biden administration didn’t fight for American tech companies internationally and how the prior administration was actively hostile to them.
Then people wonder why tech embraced Trump.
bsimpson · 2h ago
This is my fundamental problem with Elizabeth Warren et. al..
They act like the choices are omni-powerful US tech companies, or a plethora of small companies building utopia. They say "we need to hamstring our most successful companies to make space in the market for smaller players."
The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex. It's not even that those are bad companies (from what I hear, they're pretty similar internally to their US counterparts); it's that they are under the jurisdiction of administrations that are hostile to human rights.
thewebguyd · 2h ago
> The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex.
I mean, the foreign companies taking that space can be solved with sanctions, or digital services taxes, etc.
What would you propose? Maybe Google, Apple, Meta, etc. are the lesser of the big evils but we definitely have a monopoly problem in the US, and there is very little space for competition, which only continues to harm consumers.
wkat4242 · 4h ago
Trump will do a lot more harm to US tech companies than Biden. A lot of us here in Europe are moving away from US tech, and as we are building more of our own it's very unlikely we will come back.
Right now there aren't too many EU alternatives yet which is why you don't really notice yet. But the damaged trust in the US as a 'partner' will outlive Trump for decades. As they say "trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback".
overstay8930 · 3h ago
The US was never a trusted partner, Europeans just didn’t have a choice. No one company was able to spend the amount of money required to compete with American technology, so nobody did.
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
wkat4242 · 6m ago
Maybe not fully trusted but they were certainly fairly well aligned to our interests. Until trump obviously.
whywhywhywhy · 3h ago
Just seems very unrealistic wishful thinking that Europe would suddenly become good at these kinds of software after spending the last few decades being bad at it.
wkat4242 · 3h ago
It's a lot easier now because there's a huge demand all of a sudden for local services.
Previously it was hard to compete with the US because the lack of regulation there and investors in the EU having more expectations rather than just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.
But with the exploitative business models like Google's consumer tracking and now with Trump and his trade wars the US is no longer viewed as a friend or a country to look up to. I think it will only increase the EU's push for more privacy and ethical business models.
There's a big grassroots movement like "BuyFromEU" to cut US products and services out of our lives. I think that trade balance is only going to get worse. And really it was actually not bad at all, the problem is that Trump was only counting products not services when looking at the trade balance. I guess because his voters are primarily blue collar workers.
lenkite · 2h ago
After the local EU services/products all have Brussels Mandated encryption back-doors and permit free decrypting of your private data, I will bet there will be a surge back to non-EU services.
Yes, this is a big worry indeed, though not really something the US doesn't have (but they are more secretive about it). Snowden made that very clear. We just have more government transparency here.
dvtkrlbs · 1h ago
I mean a lot of EU would prefer EU backed backdoor to US backed backdoor. EU backed backdoor still sucks but I don't get this argument
terminalshort · 2h ago
You think that the EU, which is also pushing for a backdoor just like the UK, is somehow actually against tracking and data collection? You gotta pick one or the other.
wkat4242 · 13m ago
This is not the same thing. They trust themselves to track and monitor us, but not commercial parties.
I of course trust neither, but I do have to say they are doing good stuff limiting bad actors like Google and Microsoft. I just wish they would do more (e.g. ban third party cookies and tracking outright rather than forcing us to choose every time).
scarface_74 · 3h ago
The EU is not going to build its own Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, AWS etc.
Anytime the lack of “influential European tech companies” come up, the best anyone can do is money losing/barely profitable Spotify.
And the data doesn’t back your idea up that Europe is moving away from any of those companies. The EU is moving its dependence away from the US military industrial complex admittedly.
wkat4242 · 3h ago
I guess not no, but we don't need those, really. We definitely don't want carbon copies of those companies because they are causing a lot of what's wrong with this world. What we need is more ethical companies that understand the EU market. No paying with our data, no manipulative algorithms. We've been pushing for that for years but Trump has been the turning point, now people are really on board with the idea that leaving US services is better.
It will take time to build local alternatives but I'm sure they will come. We have time. You can see that companies like Microsoft are really shaken up when they're starting appeasement projects like those vows to actually protect our data (though those promises are weak because they remain bound to US law)
And this goes hand in hand with the defense initiatives. IT is important though to society to be considered a critical asset.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost.
And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway.
But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems.
[1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.
dvtkrlbs · 1h ago
What I am wondering is if the complexity of AWS is required for 99 percentile. There are a lot of niche services and duplicated ones on AWS and a targeted replacement for the most popular ones would be enough for most.
wkat4242 · 10m ago
You only require AWS if you build something to run on AWS. That's the thing. You can easily run it on something else, just build it for that specifically. Now, AWS-style services have become somewhat of an industry standard (e.g. S3 offered by countless operators). But still, I think offering AWS style services is a weakness because you can never become better than the original.
And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it).
In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
lotsofpulp · 53m ago
Meta subsidizes a very large proportion of the world’s communication (in the form of Whatsapp/Instagram/Facebook).
Even if 98% of it is unnecessary garbage, the functionality for that last 2% has provided a ton of utility to billions of people.
wkat4242 · 8m ago
Except they make money so they don't subsidise it. They get paid for it but through our data. Which is what we don't want here in Europe anyway.
esafak · 4h ago
tl,dr: "Vance argued that free speech and democracy were threatened by European elites."
edit: Don't shoot the messenger.
tacker2000 · 4h ago
To be clear in this case, this is not Europe or the EU, its solely the UK government wanting a backdoor for themselves.
veeti · 3h ago
To be clear in this case, the UK is a country in north-western Europe.
GrayShade · 3h ago
To be clear, the EU is also pushing for encryption and hardware backdoors.
tokai · 1h ago
To be clear US does not need to push for hardware backdoors and more because they already got them.
wkat4242 · 3h ago
Of course because the UK isn't even in the EU anymore. They're no longer any part of EU policy.
ascorbic · 1h ago
Still European though.
vixen99 · 3h ago
Very much a matter of defining 'themselves'. Our data in their hands. How do we know these people aren't the same incompetents who emailed a spreadsheet containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 Afghan asylum applicants (who had risked their lives to help the Brits) to someone outside the Ministry of Defense.
The government says the individual thought they were sending a list of about 150 names, not the whole set.
> A spreadsheet containing the personal information of about 18,700 Afghans and their relatives – a total of about 33,000 people – was accidentally forwarded to the wrong recipients by email in February 2022, Healey told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
This is why authorization matters. Don't send the spreadsheet; send a link to it, because e-mail doesn't implement authorization. Then you can revoke access at any time, and even prevent accidents by setting up access rules and monitoring at the org level.
This tracks. Vance is probably a potential supporter of strong crypto insofar as it’s demanded of him by the VC class.
isodev · 3h ago
The specified policy aside, it’s kind of sad to see - the UK after Brexit just doesn’t carry the same weight. It would’ve been a different story if the UK as part of the EU were moving forward with a piece of legislation.
No comments yet
tempodox · 2h ago
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy
This is extremely ironic (“Americans’ privacy” basically does not exist), but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online.
> Now every force in the country has a team sifting through people’s posts trying to determine what crosses an undefined threshold. “It is a complete nightmare,” one officer admits
Britain’s police are restricting speech in worrying ways https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police... From The Economist
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
The position of the US executive on encryption is well summarized by the Lavabit case.
> Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, which has been ordered to help the F.B.I. get into the cell phone of the San Bernardino shooters, wrote in an angry open letter this week that "the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create." The second part of that formulation has rightly received a great deal of attention: Should a back door be built into devices that are used for encrypted communications?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-...
This leaves contact mining as the odd one out, but given how many apps want to see your contacts, you know that those are being sold by at least one of those apps.
None of this stuff has ever been end-to-end encrypted, so there can't be any way people expect it to be private.
It's the reason that Apple and Google recently started rebooting devices that haven't been unlocked in a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
It's no secret that there are groups actively looking for new exploits and that sometimes vulnerabilities are discovered that become zero days. It's a good bet that police and security services take an active interest in those vulnerabilities when they are found.
But that's very different to claiming the police can easily unlock any device any time they want to and there is a range of private companies around who provide that service to them.
He said Apple does not have and won’t create a backdoor. That was well crafted and means exactly what he said, any implicit meaning is an artifact of your brain.
I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...
There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.
That seems to be the most salient property of his presidency. His position on any issue is whatever he just said, with no regard to what it might have been yesterday.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
I think that’s exactly why I want encryption.
There are two problems here:
(1) We devote more resources to catching child abusers. There are all kinds of legal "if you see something, say something" requirements that make every doctor, nurse, and schoolteacher in the country part of the effort to do this.
(2) I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections. There are many, many circumstances where you're free to devote double the resources to something, but you'll see at best a trivial improvement in results.
You make this statement but provide no evidence. Because there's laws on the books, we "devote more resource" than, say the entire DEA, which unlike these laws has a gargantuan budget? That's nonsense.
> I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections.
Look harder? Read up on the topic? String operations work. More would work more often and catch more abusers.
Let alone the resources we could be pouring into children's mental health services (instead of kicking families off health insurance like the current administration has accomplished).
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
DOGE is clearly operating illegally for other reasons - not distributions funds that were appropriated by Congress for instance. But data sharing isn’t the root issue. It’s spineless Republicans in Congress and a sycophantic Supreme Court.
And it’s possible to say both that if you are here illegally you should be deported and that it’s currently being driven by animus, cruelty and it should be easier to obtain legal residency especially in areas where we do need more workers and implement another program like Reagan did in the 80s
You don't want your local dog catcher to be able to look at your medicare records just because "he's the government, and medicare records are government data".
Beyond that many of the departments that this data is being extracted from have rules about who can access (no not everyone in the IRS has free reign) and what they can do with it. For good reason, IRS's job is to focus on what the law says they should do, not say punish political enemies and so on.
But transfer it to DODGE, ICE, Palantir, there are no laws at all regarding what they can do with that data.
In some countries, tax data is available to everyone. Norway, Finland and Sweden in particular. There may be others
Shouldn't everybody have access to government data, with a few exceptions?
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
https://studee.com/media/mps-and-their-degrees-media
The most popular subjects for MPs who won seats in the Dec 2019 election
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Surely some of them understand the technical details. That doesn't necessarily mean they understand or respect the wider implications of a policy. This is why it's important to have a government that sets policy - taking into account all of the competing influences and potential consequences - and politically neutral technicians who then implement government policy.
No-one would dispute that if the government could examine every communication everyone ever sends then it could catch more very bad people and prevent more harm to innocent people. The problem is all the other stuff that also happens if you give a government that kind of power over its own people.
If by "hack" you mean she guessed the password, then yes.
Rupert Murdoch is 94.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland" Angela Merkel (2013) during a press conference with Obama.
"The internet is uncharted territory for us"
With a few notable exceptions, the level of knowledge, expertise and understanding amongst government advisers and policy makers is abysmally low. c.f. https://jackgavigan.com/2015/11/23/how-well-advised-was-the-...
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
I'm not being sarcastic. For real, what major government wouldn't want that in their favor?
Unless they're even more hubristic than we imagined.
They care about maybe a maximum of five having that access, and I'm sure they realize that #1 on that list (PRC) won't need much time to become a peer on any given technology.
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation.
When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together” just to open MSPaint and create shitty drawings. I don’t see anything similar today.
Ever take photos or videos with your phone? Is that not creation?
>When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together”
Same, but this is more "old man yells at clouds". Children today have their own way of creation, now using AI.
What did they mean by this
They've been looking to use AI for consumer surveillance; AI user monitoring essentially.
"We can't have a backdoor so we can't use AI to monitor the user"
Turns out it was not 4D chess after all…
Helpless indeed - but, government still requires the consent of the governed. It's just that we are all very comfortable, with a lot to lose and easily distracted, so that consent to be governed is too easily given nowadays.
If we do anything together as a society it should be making sure to preserve E2E Encryption as it's one of the most important tools to organize a resistance should we wish to revoke our consent to be governed.
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
We may not like everything about the current American administration, but credit where due.
Apple makes home computers, mobile devices, AV equipment and productivity/multimedia software.
Meta makes social media platforms, and vr headsets. What exactly makes them "rivals"? WhatsApp vs iMessage? They're two big companies in the same sector, sure, but do they really compete against each other in a major way?
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-european-commissi...
I wonder how this clash is going to turn up. I would hate this development. This proposal is worthy of the Chinese Communist Party, and I am aghast just how many member states are fine with the concept of a preemptive surveillance state and breaking privacy left and right.
Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??) She already has a reputation from her career in German politics, having earned the nickname Zensursula (censoring Ursula).
To answer your question: because the Conservatives just couldn't be arsed to put up an alternative.
IIRC current Kanzler, Friedrich Merz, is not at all her friend and will complicate things for her on purpose. So we will see.
Then people wonder why tech embraced Trump.
They act like the choices are omni-powerful US tech companies, or a plethora of small companies building utopia. They say "we need to hamstring our most successful companies to make space in the market for smaller players."
The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex. It's not even that those are bad companies (from what I hear, they're pretty similar internally to their US counterparts); it's that they are under the jurisdiction of administrations that are hostile to human rights.
I mean, the foreign companies taking that space can be solved with sanctions, or digital services taxes, etc.
What would you propose? Maybe Google, Apple, Meta, etc. are the lesser of the big evils but we definitely have a monopoly problem in the US, and there is very little space for competition, which only continues to harm consumers.
Right now there aren't too many EU alternatives yet which is why you don't really notice yet. But the damaged trust in the US as a 'partner' will outlive Trump for decades. As they say "trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback".
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
Previously it was hard to compete with the US because the lack of regulation there and investors in the EU having more expectations rather than just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.
But with the exploitative business models like Google's consumer tracking and now with Trump and his trade wars the US is no longer viewed as a friend or a country to look up to. I think it will only increase the EU's push for more privacy and ethical business models.
There's a big grassroots movement like "BuyFromEU" to cut US products and services out of our lives. I think that trade balance is only going to get worse. And really it was actually not bad at all, the problem is that Trump was only counting products not services when looking at the trade balance. I guess because his voters are primarily blue collar workers.
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/eu-pushes-for-backdoors-in-...
I of course trust neither, but I do have to say they are doing good stuff limiting bad actors like Google and Microsoft. I just wish they would do more (e.g. ban third party cookies and tracking outright rather than forcing us to choose every time).
Anytime the lack of “influential European tech companies” come up, the best anyone can do is money losing/barely profitable Spotify.
And the data doesn’t back your idea up that Europe is moving away from any of those companies. The EU is moving its dependence away from the US military industrial complex admittedly.
It will take time to build local alternatives but I'm sure they will come. We have time. You can see that companies like Microsoft are really shaken up when they're starting appeasement projects like those vows to actually protect our data (though those promises are weak because they remain bound to US law)
And this goes hand in hand with the defense initiatives. IT is important though to society to be considered a critical asset.
And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway.
But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems.
[1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.
And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it).
In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
Even if 98% of it is unnecessary garbage, the functionality for that last 2% has provided a ton of utility to billions of people.
edit: Don't shoot the messenger.
The government says the individual thought they were sending a list of about 150 names, not the whole set.
Meanwhile the Taliban have been taking revenge: https://pressway.org.uk/news/300408-hunt_for_tranclators_tal...
This is why authorization matters. Don't send the spreadsheet; send a link to it, because e-mail doesn't implement authorization. Then you can revoke access at any time, and even prevent accidents by setting up access rules and monitoring at the org level.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/17/how-were-identities...
No comments yet
This is extremely ironic (“Americans’ privacy” basically does not exist), but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.