Jess Weatherbed with a fantastic review of some of the political history behind the UK’s recent attempt to backdoor the world, and Apple’s response of pulling Advanced Data Protection from their UK customers. This, especially, rings true:

Apple’s withdrawal of ADP can be interpreted as a call to break an intentionally curated silence around Britain’s bullish efforts to crush end-to-end encryption services. It’s a call that other encryption service providers don’t seem to be answering, however. Meta, Signal, and Telegram haven’t made any announcements about their own services that provide full encryption and haven’t responded to our requests to comment on the situation. Their silence and the ongoing availability of encryption features in the UK would suggest that nothing is amiss.

Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist at the EFF, says that this is likely the case because the encryption services provided by most communications companies aren’t as broad as Apple’s ADP offering.

My working theory is the UK government doesn’t care (as much) about your text messages—iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, etc. They will happily grab them if available, of course, but people understand text messages are viewable by others and are therefore more likely to either delete them or write obliquely if they’re hiding something.

No, what the UK (and other governments) really want is all the other data from Apple devices that people may not realize is being collected—locations, photos, search history for Maps and Safari, and so on—data that is accessible to Apple and governments on Standard data protection-enabled devices (via the keys that Apple holds) but which becomes inaccessible when Advanced Data Protection is enabled.

They’ll happily leave your text messages encrypted (but see the next section) if it allows them access to the truly valuable data the average person doesn’t even realize is exposed. Texting about robbing a bank is suggestive. A month’s worth of location data showing you hanging around with other suspected bank robbers, then being at the bank while it’s being robbed, along with photos from the area a week before, and a Maps search showing the fastest route from the bank—that’s actionable.