UK petition to keep Apple data encrypted | Hacker News Reader

UK petition to keep Apple data encrypted

you.38degrees.org.uk

53 pointslatexr17 comments

Open articleView on HN

Why is this on a site that wants you to sign up for marketing, rather than the GOV.UK petitions site?

Has there ever been any petition in the UK that has achieved any effect other than "thanks we'll think about it"?

The UK petitions website exists solely to appease the naive electorate, if it worked they'd have shut it down already.

It's the equivalent of those door buttons in elevators. "Give them something to do when they're restless."

> Has there ever been any petition in the UK

Online petitions are useless for anything beyond harvesting a list of potential donors.

The value in a petition or protest is in demonstrating commitment. If you’re willing to fill in a paper form and/or show up somewhere inconvenient, you’re might also be willing to phone bank (and petition for) a primary opponent.

Online petitions do none of that. If an issue has lots of online petitions and nothing else, it’s almost a sign that its base is electorally useless.

After 50k signatures asked for Jeremy Clarkson to be appointed PM, Downing Street said Nah - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNy1w4DV5Hw

Petitions don't work on the whole. afaik, they exist to the give the public the illusion that their opinion matters.

A slightly cynical take, but accurate none-the-less.

Great example of "well think about it" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE&pp=ygUhc2tpdCBraWx...

I guess I’m in the minority here, but personally I would prefer UK law enforcement to have judge mediated access to encrypted data. Why? Because I’m a law abiding citizen who thinks the police do a good job in general and I want them to be able to keep my kids safe from drugs, my property safe from theft and so on. Sorry that this is unfashionable.

Of course, this will not stop crinimals from using dark web tools and so on - and it will not stop me from using encryption (steganosis anyone?) if I feel like it.

That sort of naiveté is only possible if you’ve never had to interact with the police, especially as a non-white or non-native Brit. Try going to a protest if you’d like to see evidence of this.

“Good” police may be possible, but it’s not what the UK has.

Instead of petition, people should wake up and vote better for their representatives...

They did! They ousted an overtly-corrupt pile of idiots distilled down from a decade of party in-fighting over Brexit and replaced them with a well-meaning pile of idiots. Only time will tell how they do on big picture things.

But I can't vote for someone now. And even if I could, I can't vote for the person you're talking about because none of the constituency candidates talk about data security. And even if there were, would they align with the other things I want? And even if they did, would their party that delivered them a majority in Parliament also think their way or would that be an artefact and lost to party politics?

Telling people to vote better only works if there is a party who is championing the policy, and that they're also not arseholes in other areas.

> Instead of petition, people should wake up and vote

Agreed.

“Turnout at the 2024 general election was 59.7%, which was the lowest at a general election since 2001. Turnout was 7.6 percentage points lower than in 2019” [1].

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2024-t...

That doesn't work for issues that are of secondary or tertiary importance from the perspective of almost all voters.

Especially in horrible electoral systems like the ones in UK you have to pick the least bad out of 2 options (every vote for third party is wasted).

I also really doubt that conservatives would behave any differently.

So, is this the UK gov testing the waters or is Apple the only company that didn't quietly aquiesce when handed a secret order?

There's actually a solution to this problem which I stumbled on a few days ago.

Obviously we cannot allow backdoors, and people should have their stuff encrypted, and if the UK's authortarian government wants to know what's being said they should do their job and crack the encryption.

So realistically the UK could just make it illegal to use any encryption algorithm other than DES for anything... in the UK anyway.

Good job, but the assignment here is not figuring out how the UK can more easily destroy the privacy of their citizens.

If you use anything stronger than ROT13 you're probably a wrong'un

Reply on news.ycombinator.com