Back in February, the UK quietly ordered Apple to weaken iCloud security by creating a backdoor—basically, a way for the government to access people’s private data. Apple pushed back and instead pulled its Advanced Data Protection feature from the UK altogether. That feature offers stronger, end-to-end encryption for iCloud, making user data much harder to access.
Apple then took the issue to court, challenging the demand through the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. At first, everything was happening behind closed doors. But now, judges have said the case needs to be made public. They argued it’s not right to keep something this important completely secret.
The UK government claimed that revealing details could put national security at risk. But the judges disagreed, saying transparency matters—and that simply acknowledging the case wouldn’t harm the public interest or security:
In a ruling published on Monday morning, the tribunal judges rejected that request – pointing to the extensive media reporting of the row and highlighting the legal principle of open justice.”
It would have been a truly extraordinary step to conduct a hearing entirely in secret without any public revelation of the fact that a hearing was taking place,” it states.
For the reasons that are set out in our private judgement, we do not accept that the revelation of the bare details of the case would be damaging to the public interest or prejudicial to national security,” it later adds.
In short, Apple’s standing firm on privacy, and the UK is facing growing pressure to explain why it wants access to encrypted data.
