RIM Plays Hard, Says Access to Its Customers Data is Impossible

After UAE government decided last week to officially forfeit Blackberry services in the country starting middle October, RIM issued yesterday an official statement that clears up the company's position towards data access requests received from numerous countries in the region. India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuweit and China have repeatedly asked the Canadian company to give their governments access to customers data on the account of fighting terrorists who use Blackberry devices to communicate.

While RIM's statement doesn't directly refer to the soon to come ban over its services in UAE, the company explained the features of Blackberry security system and said that it would be impossible for RIM to circumvent them.

Outlining the infrastructure of its Blackberry network, RIM stated that “no one, including RIM, could access customer data, which is encrypted from the time it leaves the device. Thus RIM would simply be unable to accommodate any request for a key to decrypt the data, since the company doesn't have the key.”

Further the company said that its network has been built so it could exclude the capability for RIM or any other third-party software to read encrypted information under any circumstances. Also, the reason implied by the recent UAE ban over its services, that the Canadian company didn't set up a server in the country cannot be valid, as the location of Blackberry servers does not matter as long as the data on them cannot be deciphered without a proper decryption key.

In the end, RIM insisted to assure its customers that their data is safe and that it will not compromise the integrity and security of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution. From the statement we can guess that the Canadian company doesn't feel any pressure over the numerous requests to give access to its customers data coming from many countries in Asia. By the way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Blackberry services will be banned in 2-3 more countries until the end of the year.