14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is giving in to Russia and moving domestic user data to local servers, as per a 2014 law that requires companies to store information for up to six months.
The law came into effect in 2018 and as per Foreign Policy, could force Apple to “decrypt and hand over user data to security services on request.”
Russian government agency Roskomnadzor confirmed that Apple decided to comply with the law and store user data on local servers, but a decision from the Cupertino-based tech giant is yet to be offered.
On the other hand, there are lots of questions that need to be answered, and the most important concerns the nature of the information that will be stored on Russian servers.
The cited source claims a registration that Apple made with the government agency indicates that details likely names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers are among the data that it collects from users. But at the same time, Apple also has access to iCloud backups, which include photos, videos, documents, contacts, and messages, all of which could be shared with the Russian government.
Privacy struggles
Last year, Apple took a similar decision in China, where it was also required to store user data on local servers.
The company has a hard time dealing with all the privacy concerns these days, especially as Apple officials remain tight-lipped and only share very limited details about the decision it makes.
More recently, a bug in its Group FaceTime service allowed anyone to spy on contacts without them even answering calls. Apple was accused of ignoring an earlier bug report that would have allowed the company to protect its users.
A fix for this issue is still in the works, and Apple says it is projected to be released sometime in the coming days, after previously being delayed from late last week.