167
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
167 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
63082 readers
3204 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
So despite all the tough talk, they just roll over and capitulate. The only way to protest this is to move your stuff off Apple.
Apple’s choices here were:
Do what they did, and remove the feature for the UK only
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.
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.
…to less-secure alternatives? Do you really think Google is going to say “no backdoor, we’re keeping encryption, we don’t need YOUR market”?
To a more secure alternative, obviously. There are other options than Apple and Google.
No? Kinda? I'd say a Pixel (so Google hardware, yeah) with Graphene, and either self-hosted, or independent end-to-end encrypted could storage.
There are alternatives to the tech conglomerates.
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.
You could swap out the Pixel+Graphene for say a FairPhone+LineageOS. I ran misc-secondhand-phone+LineageOS for over a decade. Still selfhost everything I need. My family have all their photos upload to my nextcloud instance instead of Google.
My switch to Pixel+Graphene is because ultimately the problem is political not technical. A banking app I needed for work refused to run without the real Google services. It also refused Custom ROMs. I tried a lot of tricks. Also GoogleMaps is the only satnav with traffic information in the route planning. There is other things, but Graphene allows you a compromise of running the Google services, but sandboxed.
The problem is not technical, it's political. Most people don't understand the difference between a standard and a monopoly. The law makers are asleep to monopolies and the need for competition in the tech world, so have allow this tech dystopia to happen. Some that are more awake know big monopolies are easier to get things like this story from. Multinational corporation are money machines, they won't really fight for their users. But they miss the bigger picture.
If you care about all this stuff, there is groups like:
https://openrightsgroup.org/
https://fsfe.org/
Maybe also https://openuk.uk/ , though they more work with big tech.