Apple Challenges UK iCloud Backdoor Order

The order is a crime for Apple to describe, so British users learn what happens to their privacy rights from court paperwork and leaks.

Apple has filed a new complaint at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal against a UK government demand for access to the encrypted iCloud backups of British users, the Financial Times reported .

Citing an order issued by the court, the FT said the filing went in last month.

Apple confirmed the complaint to Reuters and said nothing further. The company's one repeated line, over years of this fight, is that it has never built a backdoor into any of its products or services and never will.

Apple has little to say but it's likely because saying more would break the law. The order under challenge is a "technical capability notice," a secret demand issued by the Home Secretary under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 .

A TCN can force a company to give UK security services access to customer data even when it is encrypted, and the company that receives one cannot legally disclose it without the Home Secretary's permission.

Apple and the Home Office both refuse to confirm the notice exists.

A British government spokesperson declined to confirm or deny the existence of any notice, Reuters reported. The spokesperson said, "The UK supports strong encryption and robust privacy protections, but it is also vital that law enforcement can access communications when necessary and proportionate to protect the public from terrorism, serious crime, and child sexual abuse."

The people whose backups are at stake and privacy at risk hear about all of this through leaks and court paperwork, never from the company or the government.

The government has even fought to keep even the courtroom shut. When Apple challenged the first version of this order in 2025 , the Home Office asked the tribunal not to list the March hearing publicly at all, so that it would take place entirely in secret. The tribunal refused and said that would be "the most fundamental interference with the principle of open justice."

Even its April 2025 judgment came in two versions , a public summary and a full ruling that only Apple and the Home Office were allowed to read.

In July 2025 the tribunal directed the government to agree "assumed facts" with Apple, Privacy International said , to form the basis of a seven-day hearing to be scheduled in early 2026. The idea was to hear as much of the case as possible in open court.

According to court filings , that notice allowed the interception of communications and covered multiple categories of data stored in iCloud backups. It required Apple to remove the electronic protection where that was "reasonably practicable."

Apple pulled Advanced Data Protection from the UK within weeks , rather than build a way in. ADP keeps the keys to a user's encrypted backups on that user's own devices - Apple never holds them - so the company cannot read the data and cannot hand over what it cannot read. British users who already had it switched on were given what Privacy International described as "a period of time to disable the feature themselves to keep using their iCloud account."

"We told them you can't do this," President Trump said after meeting the UK Prime Minister in February 2025 . According to Reuters, Britain dropped the worldwide order last year after months of negotiations with his administration.

But the retreat only went as far as American data. In the second half of 2025, the FT reported in October, British authorities issued a new TCN, this one leaving American users out . Privacy International said Apple's challenge to the original notice was dismissed in October 2025.

The US claimed in August 2025 that the UK had withdrawn the demand , the Electronic Frontier Foundation said , but Apple did not re-enable Advanced Data Protection. The withdrawal leaves British users with weaker protection than they had before the first demand arrived.