Like 99.9% of Apple users that didn’t even know the feature existed before this all blew up.
I didn’t opt in because if I lost my device or got locked out of my account, my data is toast. Given I’m not a criminal and use iCloud to store things like 20 years family photos, the risk of losing that data because the encryption key is tied to an account which only I can access is too much of a risk.
If I’m run over by a bus tomorrow, I’d rather my wife being able to get access to this data that otherwise wouldn’t be possible if the encryption key literally died with me.
This thread is full of utterly terrible takes though. A lot don’t seem understand what the feature is and what the government is requesting or that its opt in and Apple doesn’t ever prompt the user to turn it on. This is rather concerning given we are effectively on a ‘tech’ forum, if people here don’t understand it, the tech muggles have got no chance.
Edit: To be clear, I’m in no way defending the government but that doesn’t make a lot of the takes here and less terrible.
The legislation isn’t going to meet the objectives set. Largely because the kinds of people who enables this feature for nefarious reasons will just migrate to something else which isn’t impacted.
The internet doesn’t recognise jurisdictional boarders where as the law and the courts do. In other words, if a cloud service provider doesn’t have a U.K. presence, there is nothing the home office can do to enforce U.K. legislation on that service provider. So there will always be services which offer what Apple offered in the market to use, hence there will always be places for the criminals to hide and exchange data in the cloud which the security services will never be able to access so it’s pointless.
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