Apple shuts down iPhone privacy feature for ALL Brits after Government demands access to photos, texts and emails

BRITS will lose access to a powerful iPhone security feature designed to protect you from spying.

It comes after the UK government demanded access to the private data of iPhone owners.

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The feature is called Advanced Data Protection, and it's meant to keep your iCloud back-ups safe.

iCloud is where your photos, videos, and texts are stored as back-ups – so if you ever lose or upgrade your iPhone, you can restore them on the new one.

This is some of the most private info an iPhone owner can have, so protecting it is especially important.

With Advanced Data Protection switched on, the contents of your iCloud back-ups are encrypted.

That means no one else but you can see them. Even Apple can't view them, which means it can't share them with the police or spies.

Apple says that the feature is meant to protect you, and that building a backdoor into the setting would put users at risk from hackers.

Now to comply with the Government, Advanced Data Protection will have to be removed.

That means anything that you've got stored in iCloud will no longer be encrypted.

Any of the info can be accessible by Apple, and ultimately shared on to police with a warrant.

The tech giant says it's "gravely disappointed" that the feature has been removed for Brits.

"Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature," Apple explained in a statement.

"ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices.

"We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.

"Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.

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"Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the United Kingdom.

"As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will."

WHAT IS ADVANCED DATA PROTECTION?

Advanced Data Protection, or ADP, is an Apple safety feature.

It launched back in December 2022 in the USA, and made its way to Britain in early 2023.

Many iPhone users will be backing up their data to iCloud.

That means it's stored on servers away from the iPhone so if you lost your handset or upgraded to a new model, you wouldn't lose anything.

Lots of stuff is kept in iCloud, like the texts you send over iMessage or the snaps in your Photos app.

Some of this data will be extremely personal, so you'd want to keep it safe.

Advanced Data Protection is a way to do that, by scrambling the data with encryption.

It means that there's no way for anyone other than the account holder to view that data.

So unless someone can log in as you, the data can't be seen.

Even if someone hacked into Apple's servers, they'd just see a jumbled mess of data rather than your private info.

It also means that Apple can't see the data – like texts, pics, videos, and emails – even if it wanted to.

And as a result, Apple can't hand that data over to the Government, police, or spies.

WHY IS ADP DISAPPEARING FROM IPHONES?

The feature will be unavailable from British iPhones as of 3pm on Friday, February 21.

It's linked to a Government request for access to the data on iPhone owners by Apple.

This data is encrypted, which means Apple and the Government couldn't previously access it.

But the Home Office is understood to have used the Investigatory Powers Act to force Apple to hand over info to law enforcement.

Apple said that it wouldn't create a backdoor in the feature for the Government.

So instead, Apple has opted to remove the feature entirely.